# Payments Engineer

**Company:** [Mercor](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/mercor)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, New York, NY
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $100k – $500k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Go, Rust, C++, Postgres, MySQL, Stripe, Adyen, Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, Kubernetes, Temporal, Pci-Dss
**Posted:** 2026-03-26

> Build and scale resilient payments infrastructure for a high-volume AI talent marketplace, focusing on observability, automation, and reliability in payout orchestration, ledgers, and settlements. Requires 5+ years backend experience, preferably in fintech, with expertise in payment gateways and distributed systems.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Build flow-level observability across payout → settlement → reconciliation
- Reliability engineering for distributed payment systems
- Instrumentation and monitoring of financial primitives (ledger, payout orchestration, settlement ingestion)
- Automation to eliminate manual treasury and payout workflows
- Root-cause driven system redesign
- Automate payout orchestration (no more human-triggered scripts)
- Build a real operational ledger (immutable, auditable, boringly correct)
- Design settlement ingestion + reconciliation pipelines
- Improve observability across payout → processor → bank flows
- Eliminate recurring payment bugs at the root cause
- Reduce manual treasury overhead
- Abstract processor dependencies

## Requirements
**Must Haves:**
- 5+ years in building scalable backend systems, preference for payments, fintech, billing, or financial infrastructure
- 3+ years backend/platform engineering with ownership of production systems
- Experience integrating with third-party payment gateways (e.g., Stripe, Adyen) and/or direct banking APIs
- Understanding of financial regulations, PCI-DSS, secure handling/encryption of sensitive data
- 3+ years building around transactional databases like **MySQL** or **PostgreSQL**
- Compiled languages like **Go**, **Rust**, or **C++**
- Experience with message queues or streaming platforms (e.g., **RabbitMQ**, **SQS**, **Kafka**)
- Distributed systems frameworks like **Temporal**, **Kubernetes**
- Proven ability to manage/operate production systems under load with observability

## Nice-to-Haves / Mindset
- Comfortable in high intensity, fast-growing, ambiguous environments
- Systems and strategic thinking

## Benefits
- Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
- $10K housing bonus (if within 0.5 miles of office)
- $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
- Free Equinox membership
- Health insurance

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