Software Engineer, Applied AI - Systems

The role

You will design, build, and operate backend services, APIs, and data pipelines within the Applied AI stack. You will own features end to end, from scoping and design to production deployment and maintenance.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate backend services including APIs, data models, and background jobs
• Own features end to end from scoping to production maintenance
• Build and tune high-throughput data and job pipelines
• Make systems fast and reliable through failure recovery and profiling
• Instrument code with observability, metrics, logging, tracing, and alerts
• Manage and launch containers and sandbox environments
• Manage infrastructure as code using Terraform
• Participate in on-call and debug production incidents
• Write design docs and provide code reviews
• Work with product, operations, and research partners

Required qualifications

• 2–5 years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems
• Strong fundamentals in backend engineering: data structures, algorithms, and concurrency
• Hands-on experience with API design - REST, gRPC, or GraphQL
• Solid database skills: relational data modeling, indexing, query performance, transactions, isolation, and safe migrations
• Familiarity with at least one NoSQL or key-value store
• Practical experience with distributed systems basics: queues, event streams, caching, idempotency, and rate limiting
• Experience with Data Orchestration and workflow management systems like Airflow, Temporal, or Dagster
• Ability to debug lower level infrastructure issues including containers, permissions, logs, and traces
• Experience running services in production: containers, CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, and debugging
• Comfort with ambiguity
• Fluency with modern AI dev tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot)
• Clear written and verbal communication

Nice to have

• Experience building or integrating with LLM-backed services in production
• Familiarity with AI infrastructure providers like Modal, Fireworks, Baseten, Temporal

Benefits

• Bi-annual performance bonus structure
• Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
• Up to $15k Relocation bonus
• $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)
• $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
• Free Equinox membership
• $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
• $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
• Health, Dental, Vision insurance

About the company

Mercor builds infrastructure that enables frontier AI labs and enterprises to train, evaluate, and improve AI on real-world professional work. The company is profitable and recently raised a $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation.