Payments Engineer

About Mercor

Mercor is defining the future of work. 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 $2 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 San Francisco NYC or London offices.

Payments is the core infrastructure of our marketplace not a back-office function. As our AI systems scale to evaluate place and compensate millions of workers across geographies we are investing in making our financial systems deterministic observable and resilient because the models that route talent are only as good as the infrastructure that pays a matter of months weve gone from moving hundreds of thousands of dollars to hundreds of millions across our platform: what used to work at $200K wont work at $200M.

The Team You Will Join

The mission of the Payments group at Mercor is to be the financial and commercial backbone of the company.

We ensure that:

• Money moves deterministically and reliably at scale

• Failures are surfaced proactively not reactively

• Ledger payout and settlement systems are observable end-to-end

• Root causes are fixed not patched

• Automation replaces manual intervention wherever possible

We operate at the intersection of Engineering Finance Product Ops and Fraud. Our mandate is to transform payments from manual orchestration into resilient financial infrastructure.

The Role

This role exists to help build the financial backbone that supports the next 1000x. We are looking for a senior engineer to help harden and scale Mercors payments platform.

You will work on:

• Flow-level observability across payout settlement reconciliation

• Reliability engineering for distributed payment systems

• Instrumentation and monitoring of financial primitives (ledger payout orchestration settlement ingestion)

• Automation to eliminate manual treasury and payout workflows

• Root-cause driven system redesign

This role requires someone who understands that payments infrastructure is both a technical and financial system where correctness matters as much as uptime.

Why This Is a Big Role

Weve grown from $200K in payment volume to $200M in a short window. The systems werent designed for this scale and thats exactly why this role matters. If you like building planes mid-flight this will feel familiar. We are no longer building payment features. We are designing sustainable financial infrastructure for a rocketship. If that sounds energizing keep reading.

What Youll Actually Do

Youll be working at the core of Mercor scaling the core systems used by thousands of experts working on the frontier of AI.

That means:

• Automating payout orchestration (no more human-triggered scripts)

• Building a real operational ledger (immutable auditable boringly correct)

• Designing settlement ingestion reconciliation pipelines

• Improving observability across payout processor bank flows

• Eliminating recurring payment bugs at the root cause

• Reducing manual treasury overhead

• Abstracting processor dependencies so were not locked in

If you want to join a rocket ship and build the systems that let it keep accelerating this is that role.

What Were Looking For

We are seeking engineers who embody an operational mindset and system-level thinking prioritizing reliability correctness and automation.

• Experience & Domain Expertise: 5 years in building scalable backend systems with a strong preference for experience in high-stakes domains such as payments fintech billing or financial infrastructure.

• Must Haves:

  1. Backend Expertise: 3 years of industry experience in backend/platform engineering (or equivalent) including ownership of production systems.

  2. Payment Infrastructure Expertise: Demonstrated ability to integrate with and manage third-party payment gateways (e.g. Stripe Adyen) and/or direct banking APIs.

  3. Compliance and Security: Understanding of financial regulations including adherence to PCI-DSS and the secure handling and encryption of sensitive banking and customer data.

• Technical Proficiency: 3 years of professional experience building around:

  1. transactional databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL

  2. compiled languages like Go Rust or C

  3. Experience with message queues or streaming platforms (e.g. RabbitMQ SQS Kafka).

  4. distributed systems frameworks like temporal k8s etc..

• Operational Excellence: Proven ability to manage and operate production systems under significant load. This includes balancing the velocity of development with maximum reliability evidenced by a commitment to detailed observability and sophisticated payment agents.

Mindset: Comfortable working with high intensity in fast-growing ambiguous environments. Thinks in terms of systems and strategic solutions not just individual tickets.

Benefits

• Generous equity grant vested over 4 years

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

• A $1.5K monthly stipend for meals

• Free Equinox membership

• Health insurance

Required Experience:

IC