Software Engineer, Backend

About the role

Mercor's products—talent matching, assessment, expert workflows—are growing faster than any single team can architect for. You'll define the technical direction of the systems they all depend on: core services, data models, APIs, and infrastructure patterns that must scale with a network of tens of thousands of experts and the demands of the world's leading AI labs.

What You’ll Do

• Own the architecture of Mercor's shared backend systems—core services, data models, APIs, and cross-product infrastructure.
• Define and drive the long-term technical strategy for backend architecture across the organization.
• Design systems for scale, reliability, and evolvability, and lead the highest-stakes technical decisions and design reviews.
• Pay down architectural debt that slows product teams, and lead complex cross-team migrations.
• Establish backend engineering standards, patterns, and best practices adopted across all product teams.
• Stay hands-on: prototype critical systems, ship production code, and unblock teams on their hardest technical problems.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar across the engineering organization.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on build-vs-buy decisions, platform investments, and technical hiring.

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years of professional backend engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a Senior level or above.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, data modeling, and API design at scale.
• A track record of owning architecture across multiple teams or an entire organization—and of decisions that aged well.
• Experience leading large, complex technical migrations in production without stopping the business.
• Strong opinions, loosely held: you drive alignment through technical judgment and clear writing, not authority.
• Freshly fluent in using modern AI development tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar) to improve engineering productivity.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising the technical bar across an organization.
• Excellent communication skills—able to make complex tradeoffs legible to both engineers and leadership.
• High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.