Software Engineer, Backend

About Mercor

Mercor is at the intersection of labor markets and AI research. 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 cant be captured in code alone. Today more than 30000 experts in our network collectively earn over $1.5 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. Youll 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 new San Francisco headquarters.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer at Mercor youll join a small product-driven engineering team building modern backend systems that power critical workflows for some of the most advanced AI companies in the world. Youll own projects end-to-end designing building and shipping production systems that directly impact customers. From day one youll write production-grade code reason about systems holistically and make decisions that tie directly to business outcomes. Youll work closely with product and design moving fast while upholding a high bar for code quality scalability and simplicity.

At the end of the process youll be team-matched to where you can have the most impact on one of the following:

• Talent platform side building next-generation tools that automate recruiting end-to-end intelligently match candidates to roles and power global hiring with seamless contracts and payments.

• Applied AI/human data side partnering with top AI researchers from the AI labs like OpenAI Anthropic and Google to create post training datasets to improve foundational model capabilities.

What Youll Do

• Design and build scalable backend APIs services and infrastructure.

• Collaborate across the stack with product and design to ship features quickly.

• Write clean maintainable code and contribute to documentation.

• Participate in code reviews technical design discussions and retros.

• Solve real-world customer problems under real-world constraints.

• Contribute to core systems that power training evaluation and scaling for leading AI labs.

What Were Looking For

• Strong coding fundamentals in at least one modern language (Python Go Rust etc.).

• Understanding of data structures algorithms and distributed systems.

• Familiarity with APIs SQL/NoSQL databases and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP).

• Bias toward ownership curiosity and asking the right questions.

• Ability to break down ambiguity and ship simple solutions to complex problems.

Why Mercor

• Impact: Your work powers how the worlds leading AI labs train and test their models.

• Learning: Get early insights into frontier model capabilities months before the market.

• Growth: Work on both infrastructure and research-adjacent projects with fast paths to ownership.

Benefits

• Generous equity grant vested over 4 years

• A $20K relocation bonus (if moving to the Bay Area)

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

• A $1K monthly stipend for meals

• Free Equinox membership

• Health insurance