Tech Lead, Systems & Platform Applied AI

About the role

Mercor's Applied AI organization builds the backend systems that turn human expertise into training data, task pipelines and evaluation infrastructure for frontier models. As Tech Lead for backend systems, you'll own architecture, ship the hardest parts yourself, and mentor other engineers, working onsite in San Francisco.

What you'll do

• Own the architecture of core services, data models, orchestration and pipeline execution layers used across the org
• Scope ambiguous problems, write the designs, ship to production and keep systems healthy
• Build high-throughput data and job pipelines with queuing, batching, idempotency, retries and backpressure
• Manage infrastructure as code with Terraform, running large volumes of containers and sandbox environments
• Set the design review bar, mentor senior engineers, participate in on-call and write incident analyses

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend engineering building and operating production systems, with cross-team architecture ownership
• Strong API design (REST, gRPC or GraphQL), relational modeling, indexing, transactions and safe migrations
• Deep distributed systems experience: queues, caching, rate limiting, designing for partial failure
• Workflow orchestration tools such as Airflow, Temporal or Dagster; containers, CI/CD, monitoring
• Comfort with ambiguity, clear communication and fluency with modern AI dev tools; LLM-backed services a plus