Software Engineer, Applied AI - Systems
Mercor · San Francisco
About this role
## 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—paying millions of domain experts to train frontier AI models. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10B. We’re hiring for a fast-paced, deeply committed team. **Work model:** In-person 5 days/week in **San Francisco, NYC, or London**. --- ## About the Role (Software Engineer, Applied AI – Systems) The **Applied AI** org builds systems that turn human expertise into training data for frontier models, including task pipelines, expert workflows, evaluation infrastructure, and the services that connect them. As a **Software Engineer on Backend Systems**, you’ll own backend services across this stack—designing **data models**, building **APIs**, and creating **data pipelines** that move work through the platform. This is a **build role**: take a roughly scoped problem, make design decisions, ship to production, and own it afterward. --- ## What You’ll Do - **Design, build, and operate** backend services: APIs, data models, background jobs, and pipelines. - **Own features end-to-end**: scope → design → ship → instrument → keep healthy in production. - Build and tune **high-throughput data/job pipelines** (queuing, batching, idempotency, retries, backpressure). - Improve **speed and reliability** with failure recovery, profiling, caching fixes, and real latency/error/cost budgets. - **Instrument** systems with observability: metrics, logging, tracing, and proactive alerts. - Work with modern tools, libraries, and frameworks. - Manage and launch **10s of thousands of containers/sandbox environments**, including resource allocation and system health. - Use **Terraform** for infrastructure as code. - Participate in **on-call**, debug production incidents, and write **RCCA** write-ups. - Write clear **design docs** and contribute to technical decision-making. - Partner with **product, operations, and research** to turn ambiguous requirements into shipped systems. --- ## What We’re Looking For - **2–5 years** of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems. - Strong backend fundamentals: data structures/algorithms, concurrency, and maintainable code. - Hands-on **API design** experience (REST, gRPC, or GraphQL) with versioning/backward compatibility. - Solid database skills: relational modeling, indexing, query performance, transactions/isolation, and safe migrations. - Practical distributed systems experience: queues/event streams, caching, idempotency, rate limiting, partial failure. - Experience with workflow/data orchestration tools (e.g., **Airflow, Temporal, Dagster**). - Comfort digging into lower-level infrastructure issues (containers, permissions, logs, traces). - Experience running services in production: containers, CI/CD, monitoring/alerting, debugging under real traffic. - Ability to handle ambiguity and drive toward a plan. - Excitement for **agentic development** and modern AI dev tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot). - Clear written and verbal communication; high ownership and bias toward shipping. --- ## Nice to Have - Experience building/integrating **LLM-backed services** in production (evaluation, orchestration, or serving). - Familiarity with AI infrastructure providers (e.g., **Modal, Fireworks, Baseten, Temporal**). --- ## Benefits - Bi-annual performance bonus - Gen
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