Member of Technical Staff

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own backend services for agentic workflows, including orchestration, tool calling, retries, fallbacks, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Ship production agents and iterate on prompts, tools, guardrails, cost, and latency based on real usage.
• Build offline and online agent evaluation infrastructure with regression detection and operational metrics.
• Design scalable core services, data models, and APIs for Mercor’s talent network.
• Make agent decisions observable, auditable, and reversible.
• Partner with product, operations, and AI researchers to determine where agents, deterministic systems, and human review belong.
• Establish backend engineering standards and raise the technical bar of other engineers.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, service architecture, data modeling, and API design at scale.
• Production experience building with LLMs, agents, tool use, retrieval, or evaluation systems, or a demonstrated ability to learn new systems quickly and ship them.
• Experience owning systems end to end from design through production operation.
• Fluency with modern AI development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar tools.
• Strong technical judgment, clear writing, and the ability to communicate complex tradeoffs to engineers and leadership.
• High ownership, pragmatism, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias toward shipping.

Benefits

• Generous equity grant vested over four years.
• Relocation and housing bonuses may be available.
• Monthly meal stipend.
• Free Equinox membership.
• Health insurance.
• In-person work five days per week in the San Francisco office; SF is the stated location preference.