Software Engineer, Backend

Mercor Alabaster

$150K — $180K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Recent graduate or early-career software engineer
  • Completed internships at top-tier tech companies or startups
  • Demonstrated experience with side projects or open-source contributions
  • Strong reasoning skills and ability to navigate ambiguity
  • Familiar with modern backend frameworks and cloud platforms
  • Proficient in at least one programming language (Python, Go, Rust, etc.)
  • Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems

Responsibilities

  • Design and build scalable backend APIs, services, and infrastructure
  • Work across the stack with product and design to ship new features quickly
  • Write clean, maintainable code and contribute to technical documentation
  • Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and team retrospectives
  • Solve customer problems within real constraints and timelines

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work on real-world infrastructure challenges
  • Growth alongside experienced technical mentors
  • Immediate responsibility for writing production-grade code
  • Engagement in impactful, customer-facing decision-making
  • Collaborative team environment that values ownership and questions
Full Job Description
About the Role

As a Software Engineer at Mercor, you'll join a small, product-driven engineering team building modern backend systems that power critical workflows for some of the most advanced AI companies in the world. You'll own projects end-to-end, designing, building, and shipping production systems that directly impact customers. From day one you'll write production-grade code, reason about systems holistically, and make decisions that tie directly to business outcomes. You'll work closely with product and design, moving fast while upholding a high bar for code quality, scalability, and simplicity.

At the end of the process, you'll be team-matched to where you can have the most impact, on one of the following:
  • Talent platform side - building next-generation tools that automate recruiting end-to-end, intelligently match candidates to roles, and power global hiring with seamless contracts and payments.
  • Applied AI/human data side - partnering with top AI researchers from the AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to create post training datasets to improve foundational model capabilities.

What You'll Do
  • Design and build scalable backend APIs, services, and infrastructure.
  • Collaborate across the stack with product and design to ship features quickly.
  • Write clean, maintainable code and contribute to documentation.
  • Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions, and retros.
  • Solve real-world customer problems under real-world constraints.
  • Contribute to core systems that power training, evaluation, and scaling for leading AI labs.

What We're Looking For
  • Strong coding fundamentals in at least one modern language (Python, Go, Rust, etc.).
  • Understanding of data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
  • Familiarity with APIs, SQL/NoSQL databases, and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP).
  • Bias toward ownership, curiosity, and asking the right questions.
  • Ability to break down ambiguity and ship simple solutions to complex problems.Why Mercor
  • Impact: Your work powers how the world's leading AI labs train and test their models.
  • Learning: Get early insights into frontier model capabilities months before the market.
  • Growth: Work on both infrastructure and research-adjacent projects with fast paths to ownership.

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

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