Staff Backend Engineer, Agentic Systems (Production AI)

AI Chopping Block; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous equity grant vested over 4 y

Relocation bonus (Bay Area)

Housing bonus (near office)

Monthly meals stipend

Free Equinox membership

Health insurance

Job summary

Mercor is hiring a Member of Technical Staff on Talent Experience in San Francisco. You will build backend systems and agent infrastructure behind Mercor's talent network, designing services that source, screen, match, and support experts with minimal human intervention.

This hands-on role involves coding end-to-end, collaborating with product, operations, and AI researchers to decide what should be an agent and what should stay deterministic, with an emphasis on observability and guardrails.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, service architecture, data modeling, and API design at scale.
• Hands-on production experience with LLMs and agents, or a track record of learning quickly.
• Ability to handle ambiguity and own end-to-end systems.
• Proficient with modern AI development tools to boost productivity.
• Excellent communication and ability to write clearly.
• High ownership and bias toward shipping.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own backend services powering Mercor's agentic workflows.
• Ship agents into production and iterate against real usage.
• Build evaluation infrastructure for offline and online metrics.
• Design scalable core services, data models, and APIs.
• Make agent decisions observable, auditable, and reversible.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and researchers on agent scope.
• Establish backend engineering standards and patterns.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

LLMs in production

System ownership

API design

Communication

AI tooling

Problem solving

Tools

Cursor

Claude Code

GitHub Copilot

Job description

Mercor is hiring a Member of Technical Staff on Talent Experience in San Francisco. You will build backend systems and agent infrastructure behind Mercor's talent network, designing services that source, screen, match, and support experts with minimal human intervention.

This hands-on role involves coding end-to-end, collaborating with product, operations, and AI researchers to decide what should be an agent and what should stay deterministic, with an emphasis on observability and guardrails.