Backend Systems Engineer – AI Data Platform

Apply; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation bonus

Housing stipend

Meals stipend

Health insurance

Equity grant

Job summary

Mercor is hiring a Backend Engineer to build and operate the Applied AI backend stack. You will design data models, APIs, and pipelines, taking features from concept to production with strong ownership.

You will optimize for speed, reliability, and observability in a fast-paced environment and collaborate across product, operations, and research teams. You will work with modern AI tooling and containerized services, owning deployments and contributing to design discussions while growing into

Qualifications

• 2–5 years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Experience with REST, gRPC, or GraphQL APIs and versioning.
• Strong relational databases and at least one NoSQL store; data modeling and queries.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services in the Applied AI stack.
• Own features end to end: design, code, ship, and production ownership.
• Build and tune high-throughput data pipelines and queues.
• Ensure system reliability with observability, metrics, logging, tracing.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and research partners to ship solutions.
• Participate in on-call and write design docs for technical decisions.

Skills

API design

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

CI/CD

Databases

Observability

Tools

Airflow

Temporal

Dagster

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

Mercor is hiring a Backend Engineer to build and operate the Applied AI backend stack. You will design data models, APIs, and pipelines, taking features from concept to production with strong ownership.

You will optimize for speed, reliability, and observability in a fast-paced environment and collaborate across product, operations, and research teams. You will work with modern AI tooling and containerized services, owning deployments and contributing to design discussions while growing into