--- title: Software Engineer, Applied AI Environments Platform description: Mercor is hiring for the Software Engineer, Applied AI Environments Platform role in San Francisco, CA. See the full description and apply. type: job url: https://www.foundrole.com/jobs/member-technical-staff-applied-ai-backend-at-mercor-01a0d4aa-8083-78b1-928f-288fa756fee5 date: 2026-11-14T04:39:17Z og_description: Join Mercor as Software Engineer, Applied AI Environments Platform in San Francisco, CA. Pays $220K–$500K per year. og_image: https://www.foundrole.com/og/4oilqy.png breadcrumbs: - label: Home url: https://www.foundrole.com/ - label: Search url: https://www.foundrole.com/jobs --- | | | |---|---| | **Company** | Mercor | | **Location** | San Francisco, CA | | **Salary** | $220K/yr - $500K/yr | | **Type** | Full Time | | **Posted** | Sep 24, 2026 | ## Is this job real? **Ghost job check:** B · Low risk. Probably a real opening. ## Visa sponsorship - **H-1B:** Mercor sponsors H-1B visas. It filed 80 H-1B petitions (FY2026 Q1 – FY2026 Q4). - **E-Verify:** No E-Verify enrollment on record for Mercor. ## Pay for similar jobs Most similar jobs pay $208,000 – $330,000 a year (median $252,000). ## Description # **About Mercor** Mercor’s mission is to organize human intelligence for the AI economy. We build the infrastructure that enables frontier AI labs and enterprises to train, evaluate, and improve AI on real-world professional work. More than five million experts have joined our network, and we pay out over $5 million daily for their knowledge and expertise. We built our training and evaluation infrastructure alongside the world’s leading AI labs. Now, we’re bringing those capabilities to enterprises across industries, enabling them to train, evaluate, and improve AI using their own expertise and standards. Our APEX benchmarks measure how AI performs on economically valuable work, while our enterprise evaluations and post-training capabilities turn those insights into measurable improvements across real-world workflows. Our work sits at the intersection of frontier AI, human expertise, and real-world application. We’re solving problems few companies have encountered, with the opportunity to influence what the world’s most advanced AI systems become capable of doing. We’re looking for people who bring different perspectives, take ownership, exercise sound judgment, and hold themselves to an exceptionally high standard. You’ll have the opportunity to do consequential work alongside talented colleagues who challenge one another, collaborate openly, and share a commitment to excellence. Mercor is profitable and recently raised a $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation. We work in person five days a week in San Francisco, New York, and London. ## About the Role Frontier labs train and evaluate their models inside environments Mercor builds: sandboxed codebases, enterprise applications, multi-tool agent worlds, and the verifiers that score what an agent did. The Environments Infrastructure team owns the platform that builds those environments, runs them at scale, and gets them to the customer, however a given customer wants to consume them, from a service they call directly to a dataset they run in their own stack. That makes this team the layer between everything Mercor authors and everyone who runs it. We build the core environment runtime, the structure of the environments themselves, the services that other teams at Mercor build on, the integrations our lab customers build against, and the pipelines that carry an environment from authoring to a training run. Every environment Mercor ships goes through this stack. The team is small, the surface area is large, and most of the big design questions are still open. You will own real pieces of this platform end to end and see what you build in use at the biggest AI labs within weeks of shipping. # What you will Do - Own the pipelines that take an environment from authoring to a lab's hands, including the packaging, validation, and versioning that make a delivery trustworthy. - Design, build, and operate the core environment runtime: how environments are built, isolated, launched, and torn down across tens of thousands of concurrent sandboxes. - Build the services other teams at Mercor use to run environments, and the APIs and integrations our lab customers build against. - Build and extend the harnesses that run agents inside our environments, and keep results consistent between our stack and a lab's. - Own features end to end: scope the problem, write the design, ship it, instrument it, and keep it healthy in production. - Work on modern cutting edge tools, libraries and frameworks. - Build for scale and reliability in the pipelines and job systems that move work through the platform: queuing, batching, retries, backpressure, and recovery when things break. - Participate in on-call for the systems you own and write up what you learn in RCCA. - Work directly with product, operations, and research partners to turn ambiguous requirements into systems that ship. # What we are Looking For - 3+ years building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems. - Strong fundamentals: data structures, concurrency, distributed systems, and quality code contributions. - Hands-on API design, with an understanding of versioning and backward compatibility. - Solid relational database skills: data modeling, query performance, and safe migrations. - Deep comfort with containers and Linux: image builds, isolation, networking, and debugging at scale. - Experience running workloads on Kubernetes or a serverless container platform like Modal. - Experience running services in production: containers, CI/CD, monitoring and alerting, and debugging issues under real traffic. - Clear written and verbal communication. High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping. # Nice to Have - Experience with agent harnesses, RL environments, or evaluation infrastructure. - Experience with workflow orchestration systems like Temporal, Airflow, or Dagster. - Experience building or integrating with LLM-backed services in production (evaluation, orchestration, or serving). - Familiarity with sandboxing and microVM runtimes such as gVisor, Firecracker, or Kata. - Terraform or other infrastructure as code, and production experience on more than one cloud. **Benefits:** - Generous equity grant vested over 4 years - Health, dental, and vision insurance - 401(k) with company match - Unlimited paid vacation and sick days - Parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents - Free mental health services - $200 monthly wellness reimbursement - $1.5K monthly meal stipend - $200 monthly laundry reimbursement - Free Equinox membership - Up to $15K relocation bonus Mercor is an **Equal Opportunity Employer** and is committed to providing equal opportunity to all employees and applicants. Mercor does not discriminate based on actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, sex or gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, related medical conditions and lactation), gender identity or gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, military service and veteran status, disability, protected medical condition as defined by California or local law, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, California, or local laws and ordinances. Further, Mercor prohibits discrimination, harassment, and retaliation based on any combination of protected characteristics. This Policy applies to all areas of employment, including recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, compensation, benefits, discipline, termination, and all other privileges, terms, and conditions of employment. This Policy and the law prohibit employment discrimination against any employee or applicant based on any legally protected status. ## Skills - Temporal - Cloud Computing - Debugging - Backward Compatibility Testing - Query Optimization - Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - Monitoring and Alerting - Database Management - gVisor - Dagster - Sandboxing (Computer Security) - Terraform - Root Cause Corrective Action (Rcca) - Kubernetes - Apache Airflow - Climbing Equipment - CI/CD - Software Versioning - Packaging - Large Language Models (Llm) - Serverless Computing - Concurrent Programming - API Design - Data Modeling - Reinforcement Learning - Linux - Data Structures - On-Call Coverage - Communication - Workflow Orchestration - Distributed Systems ## Benefits - Health Insurance - Dental Insurance - Vision Insurance - Parental Leave - Paid Time Off (Pto) - Sick Leave - 401(k) Plans - Employee Stock Options (ESOs) - Relocation Assistance - Food and Meals ## Related - [Data & Analytics jobs](https://www.foundrole.com/careers/data-and-analytics?utm_source=ai_markdown)- [Machine Learning & AI jobs](https://www.foundrole.com/careers/data-and-analytics/machine-learning-and-ai?utm_source=ai_markdown)- [Artificial Intelligence Engineer jobs](https://www.foundrole.com/careers/data-and-analytics/machine-learning-and-ai/artificial-intelligence-engineer?utm_source=ai_markdown)- [Browse all companies](https://www.foundrole.com/companies?utm_source=ai_markdown) ## Explore this job market - [California](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us/california?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 260844 jobs - [San Francisco, CA](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us/california/san-francisco?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 27577 jobs - [Human Resources Services](https://www.foundrole.com/sectors/staffing-and-recruiting/human-resources-services?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 11650 jobs - [Mercor](https://www.foundrole.com/companies/mercor?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 102 jobs ## Related pages - [California](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us/california?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 260844 jobs - [San Francisco, CA](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us/california/san-francisco?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 27577 jobs - [Human Resources Services](https://www.foundrole.com/sectors/staffing-and-recruiting/human-resources-services?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 11650 jobs - [Mercor](https://www.foundrole.com/companies/mercor?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 102 jobs ## Browse - [Companies](https://www.foundrole.com/companies?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Jobs by country](https://www.foundrole.com/locations?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Jobs in the United States by state and city](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [H1B sponsors by location](https://www.foundrole.com/h1b-sponsors?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [H1B salaries](https://www.foundrole.com/h1b-salaries?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Sectors and industries](https://www.foundrole.com/sectors?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Jobs by career field](https://www.foundrole.com/careers?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Latest jobs](https://www.foundrole.com/jobs/latest?utm_source=ai_markdown)