Backend Engineer (Coding Agent Experience)

About the role

This opportunity is with Mercor, a company that connects highly skilled creative and technical professionals with leading AI research labs. The organization is based in San Francisco and is backed by investors such as Benchmark, General Catalyst, Peter Thiel, Adam D'Angelo, Larry Summers, and Jack Dorsey.

Position overview

The opening is for a Backend Engineer focused on coding-agent workflows. The work is remote and contract-based, with compensation set at $85 per hour.

Key responsibilities

• Leverage advanced AI coding agents to solve and assess challenging engineering problems.
• Inspect code produced by models for correctness, maintainability, performance, and overall quality.
• Spot defects, unusual edge cases, and likely failure points in generated output.
• Evaluate and compare responses from multiple frontier models, noting their relative advantages and limitations.
• Use sound backend engineering judgment when working through practical, real-world scenarios.
• Operate independently in an asynchronous environment and deliver work within deadlines while helping improve model performance.

Required qualifications

• At least 2 years of professional experience in backend engineering.
• Hands-on experience with APIs, distributed systems, microservices, backend platforms, or databases.
• Frequent use of AI coding assistants or agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, or similar tools.
• Strong ability to review model-generated code, detect bugs, identify edge cases, and reason about architectural tradeoffs.

Preferred background

• Prior experience working on large-scale production systems is an advantage.

Compensation and work terms

• Pay is $85 per hour.
• There is also mention of $400 per accepted task.
• Typical assignments take around 1 to 3 hours once you are ramped up.
• No fixed cap on the number of tasks you can take on.
• Payment is based on accepted work.

Application process

• Upload your resume.
• Complete an AI interview built around your resume.
• Submit the application form.

Resources and support

• Interview and platform details are available through the provided documentation resource.
• Support is available via the listed email contact.

Additional note

The hiring team reviews applications every day. Candidates should finish the AI interview and all application steps to be considered.