Software Engineer, Identity

Mercor, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous equity, vested over 4 years

Up to $15K relocation bonus

$10K housing bonus

$1,500/month meals stipend

Free Equinox membership

$200/month laundry reimbursement

$200/month personal wellness reimbursement

Health, Dental, and Vision insurance

Job summary

Mercor, Inc. is seeking an engineer in San Francisco to design and build large-scale distributed systems for managing identity and access across a network of experts. You will collaborate directly with operational teams and own system design from concept to implementation.

The ideal candidate has strong product engineering fundamentals, experience with distributed systems, and a mindset focused on security. Benefits include equity, relocation bonuses, and health insurance.

Qualifications

• Experience in building and operating production systems.
• Proven skills in managing large-scale distributed systems.
• Ability to design systems with security considerations.

Responsibilities

• Translate business requirements into distributed systems.
• Build infrastructure for managing expert identity and access.
• Define and iterate on system design based on requirements.
• Consider security implications in system design.
• Work with authentication and authorization as the network grows.

Skills

Product engineering fundamentals

Large-scale distributed systems experience

Security-minded thinking

Adaptability

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.

Why This Role

Mercor's identity infrastructure is unlike anything else in the Valley. Our enterprise Slack alone spans thousands of workspaces and tens of thousands of channels — with over 63,000 users today, the vast majority of whom are contractors and experts, not employees. That number is on track to hit 100,000. Managing access, identity, and permissions at that scale, across a global expert network spanning every client project we run, is one of the hardest distributed systems problems we have.

This team is led by Mercor's first engineer. It operates with a high degree of ownership: you'll take requirements directly from operations, design the system, and ship it. There's no one handing you a spec. The problems are novel, the scale is real, and the team has a strong track record of bringing in sharp product engineers — regardless of prior security background — and watching them thrive.

What You'll Do

• Talk directly with ops teams to understand business requirements, then translate them into large‑scale distributed systems that are designed with security in mind from the start

• Build and scale the infrastructure that manages expert identity and access across thousands of Slack workspaces, enterprise groups, and HR systems — systems that already operate at a scale most engineers never encounter

• Own your scope end to end: define the approach, build it, and iterate on it as requirements evolve

• Design for the security implications of what you're building — not auditing after the fact, but thinking through how gaps in system design compound at scale

• Work across authentication, authorization, provisioning, and directory sync as the expert network continues to grow

What We're Looking For

• Strong product engineering fundamentals — you've built and operated systems in production, you care about correctness and reliability, and you're comfortable owning scope without a lot of hand‑holding

• Large‑scale distributed systems experience — this is the most identifiable signal on a resume and a strong filter; the problems here are genuinely unprecedented in scale

• Security‑minded thinking — not a formal background necessarily, but the instinct to ask “how does this break, and what are the consequences?” when designing a system

• Adaptability — we don't want someone who will come in and replicate what they've done before; Mercor's landscape is unique and requires genuine intellectual flexibility

Benefits

• Generous equity, vested over 4 years

• Up to $15 K relocation bonus

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

• $1,500/month meals stipend

• Free Equinox membership

• $200/month laundry reimbursement

• $200/month personal wellness reimbursement

• Health, Dental, and Vision insurance