Software Engineer, Frontier Data Products

Alumni Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bi-annual performance bonus

Generous equity grant

Relocation bonus up to $15k

Monthly stipend for meals

Health, Dental, Vision insurance

Job summary

Alumni Ventures is looking for an experienced backend developer to design core systems that capture and validate expert workflows at scale. You will work closely with various teams, managing the delicate balance between automation and expert review.

The ideal candidate has production experience, sharp system design instincts, and a robust understanding of distributed systems. Great benefits include an equity grant and relocation bonus.

Qualifications

• Experience with complex stateful workflows and debugging.
• Sharp instincts for system design.
• Comfortable working with non-deterministic inputs.

Responsibilities

• Design services and state models for multi-stage workflows.
• Build orchestration primitives for long-running jobs.
• Integrate model inference into production workflows.
• Own reliability and observability for workflows.

Skills

Production backend experience

System design and service boundaries

Distributed systems toolkit

Python on AWS

Job description

About Mercor

Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We partner with leading AI labs and enterprises to provide the human intelligence essential to AI development. Our vast talent network trains frontier AI models in the same way teachers teach students: by sharing knowledge, experience, and context that can't be captured in code alone. Today, more than 30,000 experts in our network collectively earn over $3 million a day.

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

Frontier AI companies are increasingly bottlenecked on expert judgment and high‑quality data workflows. This team builds the production systems that capture, coordinate, and validate that work at scale — directly between a customer request and the output that ships. These are long‑running, stateful systems. A single job can stay live for days, interleaving automated steps, model inference, and expert review. A step marked “done” can be reopened, re‑reviewed, and redone — so “completed” is not always final, state must tolerate late mutation, and correctness must survive humans and models disagreeing with each other.

This is a backend systems and orchestration problem: distributed state machines, not pipelines. The architecture is not set. Early engineers will decide what it becomes, and the loop between “I shipped this” and “this mattered” is short.

What You’ll Do

• Design services and state models for multi‑stage workflows that fan out across automated processing and expert reviewers, then reconcile results into a coherent whole.

• Build orchestration primitives — retries, failure recovery, idempotency, auditable state transitions — for jobs that run far longer than a request and can be partially redone after the fact.

• Integrate model inference into production workflows without sacrificing debuggability or human oversight.

• Build the APIs and tooling that let product, operations, and ML teams operate, debug, and trust these systems at scale.

• Own reliability and observability for workflows where a silent failure means a corrupted result, not just a 500.

What Makes This Role Different

• You are building the core infrastructure that sits directly between customer requests and the outputs that ship — not internal tooling, not a support system.

• This product area is young and strategically central; early engineers are deciding the architecture, not inheriting it.

• The inputs are non‑deterministic by nature — you are building durable orchestration over humans and models that can disagree with each other on hour 40 of a multi‑stage job.

Day‑to‑Day

• Moving fast on genuinely hard systems problems — ambiguity is the default, not the exception.

• Working closely with product, operations, and ML teams to translate a tangle of constraints into clean system design.

• Debugging complex stateful workflows where the failure surface spans automated steps, model calls, and human reviewers.

• Owning your systems end‑to‑end: design, ship, operate, improve.

What We’re Looking For

• Production backend experience with strong opinions about what ages well and why.

• Sharp instincts for system design, service boundaries, and where to put complexity — and where to refuse it.

• Fluency with the distributed systems toolkit: async workflows, queues, idempotency, retries, and long‑running jobs as practice, not resume line items.

• Ability to take ambiguous product, operational, and ML constraints and turn them into a system that is clean and debuggable.

• Comfort working in Python on AWS with Postgres; experience with Temporal or similar workflow engines is a plus.

You’re likely someone who:

• Gets frustrated by systems that are hard to debug and takes that personally enough to fix it.

• Has strong opinions about where state should live and can defend them in a design review.

• Moves fast but doesn’t treat reliability as someone else’s problem.

• Wants your work to have a short, visible line to outcomes that actually matter to customers.

Benefits

• Bi‑annual performance bonus structure.

• Generous equity grant vested over 4 years.

• Up to $15k relocation bonus.

• $10 K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office).

• $1.5 K monthly stipend for meals.

• Free Equinox membership.

• $200 monthly laundry reimbursement.

• $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement.

• Health, Dental, Vision insurance.