# Member of Technical Staff, Agentic Systems

**Company:** [Mercor](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/mercor)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $130k – $500k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Backend Engineering, Distributed Systems, Service Architecture, Data Modeling, API Design, LLMs, AI Agents, Tool Use, Retrieval, Evaluation Systems, Cursor, Claude Code, Github Copilot, Observability
**Posted:** 2026-09-01

> Build and operate production backend services and agent infrastructure powering talent workflows, including orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, and auditable decision systems. The role requires 5+ years of backend engineering experience, distributed-systems expertise, and hands-on experience with production LLM applications.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Design, build, and own backend services powering agentic workflows, including orchestration, tool calling, retries, fallbacks, and human-in-the-loop review.
- Ship agents to production and iterate on prompts, tools, guardrails, cost, and latency using real usage.
- Build evaluation infrastructure, including offline evaluations, online metrics, and regression detection.
- Design scalable core services, data models, and APIs for the talent network.
- Make agent decisions observable, auditable, and reversible.
- Partner with product, operations, and AI researchers to determine what should be agent-driven, deterministic, or human-reviewed.
- Establish backend engineering standards and patterns 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.
- Hands-on experience building production systems with large language models, including 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, or GitHub Copilot.
- Comfort working with ambiguity and making technical tradeoffs.
- Strong technical judgment, clear writing, and excellent communication skills.
- High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Salary range: $130,000–$500,000 per year.
- Generous equity grant vesting over four years.
- $20,000 relocation bonus for moving to the Bay Area.
- $10,000 housing bonus for living within 0.5 miles of the office.
- $1,500 monthly meal stipend.
- Free Equinox membership.
- Health insurance.

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