Backend Engineer - Applied AI Platforms

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bi-annual performance bonus

Generous equity grant

Relocation bonus

Housing stipend

Meal stipend

Equinox membership

Laundry reimbursement

Wellness reimbursement

Health, Dental, Vision insurance

Job summary

Mercor is hiring a Backend Systems Engineer to own and operate large-scale backend services supporting AI training and evaluation. You will design data models, APIs, and pipelines, shipping robust code that scales under growing workloads.

Expect to collaborate with product, operations, and research teams on ambiguous requirements and high‑impact features. You’ll work in a team that values deep technical ownership, strong coding standards, and practical problem-solving as Mercor expands its

Qualifications

• 2–5 years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong fundamentals in backend engineering: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and readable code.
• Hands-on experience with API design - REST, gRPC, or GraphQL, and contracts/versioning.
• Solid database skills: relational modeling, indexing, transactions, and migrations; knowledge of NoSQL or key-value stores.
• Practical experience with distributed systems basics: queues, caching, idempotency, rate limiting, partial failure.
• Experience with Data Orchestration/workflows like Airflow, Temporal, Dagster.
• Experience running services in production: containers, CI/CD, monitoring, and debugging under real traffic.
• Comfort with ambiguity and ability to translate requirements into a plan.
• Genuine interest in AI tooling and writing quality code; strong written/verbal communication.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services including APIs, data models, workflows, and pipelines.
• Own features end to end: scope, design, ship, instrument, and maintain in production.
• Build and optimize high-throughput data and job pipelines with proper retries and backpressure.
• Improve system reliability by addressing failure recovery, latency, and cost budgets.
• Instrument observability: metrics, logging, tracing, and alerts.
• Work with modern tools and frameworks in a cutting-edge AI environment.
• Manage and deploy containers and sandbox environments at scale; infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Participate in on-call for owned systems and document learnings in RCCA.
• Write design docs and perform code reviews; collaborate with product/ops/research partners.

Skills

API design

Database skills

Distributed systems basics

Data orchestration tools

Production services

Ambiguity handling

AI dev tools

Clear communication

Tools

Airflow

Temporal

Dagster

Job description

Mercor is hiring a Backend Systems Engineer to own and operate large-scale backend services supporting AI training and evaluation. You will design data models, APIs, and pipelines, shipping robust code that scales under growing workloads.

Expect to collaborate with product, operations, and research teams on ambiguous requirements and high‑impact features. You’ll work in a team that values deep technical ownership, strong coding standards, and practical problem-solving as Mercor expands its