Member of Technical Staff, Backend

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous equity grant

relocation bonus

housing bonus

meal stipend

Equinox membership

Health insurance

Job summary

Mercor is seeking a Member of Technical Staff for talent experience to own the backend architecture that underpins every user journey. You will define technical direction for core services, data models, APIs, and cross-product infrastructure at scale.

You'll lead architectural decisions, pay down debt, and set engineering standards while remaining hands-on and mentoring senior engineers. This is a senior, technically focused role requiring strong communication with product and leadership.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience with 3+ years at senior level or above.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, data modeling, and API design at scale.
• Track record of owning architecture across multiple teams or an entire organization.
• Experience leading large, complex migrations in production without stopping the business.
• Strong opinions and clear writing to drive alignment.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising technical standards.
• Fluent with modern AI development tools to boost engineering productivity.
• High ownership and bias toward shipping.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of Mercor's shared backend systems, APIs, and data models.
• Define and drive the long-term backend architecture strategy.
• Design scalable, reliable systems and lead critical architectural decisions.
• Pay down architectural debt and manage cross-team migrations.
• Establish engineering standards and best practices across product teams.
• Remain hands-on: prototype systems and ship production code.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar.
• Collaborate with leadership on platform investments and hiring.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

API design

Architecture leadership

Mentoring

Technical decision making

Communication

Tools

Cursor

Claude Code

GitHub Copilot

Job description

About Mercor

Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents. Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You'll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.

About the Role

As a Member of Technical Staff of talent experience, you'll own the shared backend architecture that underpins every user journey for talent network at Mercor. Mercor's products - talent matching, assessment, expert workflows - are growing faster than any single team can architect for. You'll define the technical direction of the systems they all depend on: core services, data models, APIs, and infrastructure patterns that must scale with a network of tens of thousands of experts and the demands of the world's leading AI labs. You'll set the standards that dozens of engineers build on, pay down the architectural decisions that no longer fit, and make the ones that will still be right three years from now. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a management role. You'll write code, review the designs that matter most, and act as the connective tissue between product teams - partnering directly with engineering leadership to shape how the organization builds.

What You'll Do

• Own the architecture of Mercor's shared backend systems - core services, data models, APIs, and cross-product infrastructure.
• Define and drive the long-term technical strategy for backend architecture across the organization.
• Design systems for scale, reliability, and evolvability, and lead the highest-stakes technical decisions and design reviews.
• Identify and pay down architectural debt that slows product teams, and lead complex cross-team migrations.
• Establish backend engineering standards, patterns, and best practices adopted across all product teams.
• Stay hands-on: prototype critical systems, ship production code, and unblock teams on their hardest technical problems.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar across the engineering organization.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on build-vs-buy decisions, platform investments, and technical hiring.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of professional backend engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a Senior level or above.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, data modeling, and API design at scale.
• A track record of owning architecture across multiple teams or an entire organization - and of decisions that aged well.
• Experience leading large, complex technical migrations in production without stopping the business.
• Strong opinions, loosely held: you drive alignment through technical judgment and clear writing, not authority.
• Fluent in using modern AI development tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar) to improve engineering productivity.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising the technical bar across an organization.
• Excellent communication skills - able to make complex tradeoffs legible to both engineers and leadership.
• High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.

Why Mercor

Impact: Own the architecture that every Mercor product is built on, at a company scaling faster than almost any in its category.

Ownership: Organization-wide technical scope with a direct line to engineering leadership and real authority over technical direction.

Learning: Work alongside world-class engineers, product leaders, and AI researchers building products at the frontier of AI.

Growth: Shape the engineering organization itself - its standards, its architecture, and its next generation of technical leaders.

Benefits

• Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
• A $20K relocation bonus (if moving to the Bay Area)
• A $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)
• A $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
• Free Equinox membership
• Health insurance