Payments Engineer

About the role

The Payments group at Mercor ensures that money moves deterministically and reliably at scale. They lead the Ledger, Payout, and Settlement systems, making sure failures are surfaced proactively, not reactively. The team operates at the intersection of Engineering, Finance, Product, Ops, and Fraud, transforming payments from manual orchestration into resilient financial infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Automate payout orchestration (eliminate human-triggered scripts)
• Build a real operational ledger (immutable, auditable, and correct)
• Design settlement ingestion and reconciliation pipelines
• Improve observability across payout → processor → bank flows
• Eliminate recurring payment bugs at their root cause
• Reduce manual treasury overhead
• Abstract processor dependencies to avoid lock-in

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience in backend/platform engineering (or equivalent)
• Strong experience in building and managing production systems
• Experience integrating with and managing third-party payment gateways (e.g., Stripe, Adyen) and/or direct banking APIs
• Understanding of financial regulations, including adherence to PCI-DSS, and the secure handling and encryption of sensitive banking and customer data
• Experience building around transactional databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL) and compiled languages (e.g., Go, Rust, C++)
• Experience with message queues or streaming platforms (e.g., RabbitMQ, SQS, Kafka) and distributed systems frameworks (e.g., temporal, k8s)
• Proven ability to manage and operate production systems under significant load, balancing velocity with reliability

Qualifications

• Comfortable working in high-intensity, fast-growing, ambiguous environments
• System-level thinking and strategic solutions mindset

Skills

• Backend Expertise
• Payment Infrastructure Expertise
• Compliance and Security
• Technical Proficiency
• Operational Excellence

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

Pay

Compensation Range: $100K - $500K

Schedule

Work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.