Staff Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems & Pipelines

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is hiring a Backend Systems Engineer in San Francisco to design, build, and operate core services and data pipelines for the Applied AI stack. You will own APIs, data models, and batch processing workflows, ensuring high throughput and reliability in production.

You will work with a talent-dense team, using Terraform, Airflow, Temporal, Dagster, and containerized environments. This role emphasizes practical infrastructure skills and end-to-end ownership in a fast-growing AI data company.

Qualifications

• 2-5 years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong fundamentals in backend engineering: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and writing clear code.
• Hands-on experience with API design - REST, gRPC, or GraphQL, and an understanding of versioning and backward compatibility.
• Solid database skills: relational modeling, indexing, transactions, migrations, and NoSQL familiarity.
• Experience with distributed systems basics: queues, caching, idempotency, rate limiting, and partial failure handling.
• Experience with data orchestration/workflows like Airflow/Temporal/Dagster.
• Comfort in debugging lower-level infra issues, logs, traces, and production incidents.
• Experience running services in production: containers, CI/CD, monitoring, and alerting.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services including APIs, data models, and pipelines.
• Own features end to end: scope, design, code, ship, and monitor in production.
• Build and tune high-throughput data and job pipelines with proper retries and backpressure.
• Improve system reliability with failure recovery, profiling, caching fixes, and latency budgeting.
• Instrument shipped components with observability: metrics, logging, tracing, and alerts.
• Collaborate with product/ops/research to translate requirements into scalable systems.

Skills

Backend engineering

APIs design

Distributed systems

Databases

CI/CD

Containers

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Terraform

Airflow

Temporal

Dagster

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Mercor is hiring a Backend Systems Engineer in San Francisco to design, build, and operate core services and data pipelines for the Applied AI stack. You will own APIs, data models, and batch processing workflows, ensuring high throughput and reliability in production.

You will work with a talent-dense team, using Terraform, Airflow, Temporal, Dagster, and containerized environments. This role emphasizes practical infrastructure skills and end-to-end ownership in a fast-growing AI data company.