Software Engineer, Marketplace
- Salary
- $160K - $500K
- Level
- Mid
- Work type
- On-site · San Francisco
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 9 September 2026.
About the role
About Mercor
Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.
Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.
About the Role
As a Software Engineer on the Marketplace team, you will own the core systems that bring human intelligence to AI opportunities You'll work on search, matching, allocation, and workflow infrastructure at the heart of the marketplace, where systems deliver the world’s top experts to staff our cutting edge projects.
The problems are technically demanding and tightly coupled to business outcomes: latency, reliability, throughput, and system quality all directly affect marketplace performance.
What You'll Build
- Backend services that power candidate-job matching, routing, and marketplace workflows
- APIs and internal systems for search, eligibility, scoring, allocation, and fulfillment
- Data models and system abstractions for a rapidly evolving labor marketplace
- Infrastructure for real-time and asynchronous decisioning at high volume
- Operational systems and tooling that keep product-critical workflows reliable, observable, and easy to evolve
Example Problems
- • Build the systems that determine which candidates are eligible for which opportunities
- • Design matching and allocation infrastructure that balance speed, quality, and fill rate
- • Improve the performance and reliability of APIs serving marketplace decisions in real time
- • Develop workflow engines for onboarding, vetting, routing, and placement
- Design backend abstractions that let product and ML teams iterate quickly without degrading system quality
What We're Looking For
- • Track record of building and operating reliable backend systems in production
- • Strong judgment in system design, performance, reliability, and data modeling
- • Comfort working on high-throughput APIs, distributed systems, and asynchronous workflows
- • Ability to translate product and marketplace requirements into clean technical systems
- • High engineering standards and a bias toward simple, durable abstractions
Nice to Have
- • Experience with search, recommendation, matching, scheduling, or marketplace systems
- • Experience supporting ML-powered products or integrating model inference into production systems
- • Familiarity with event-driven architecture, queues, caching, and observability tooling
Why This Role
This role sits on a core decision layer of the product. Your work will directly shape how the marketplace operates: which opportunities get filled, how quickly hiring happens, and how reliably the system scales as volume and complexity increase.
Tech Stack
Python, Go, Kafka, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, Terraform
Benefits
- Bi-annual performance bonus structure
- Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
- Up to $15k Relocation bonus
- $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)
- $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
- Free Equinox membership
- $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
- $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
- Health, Dental, Vision insurance
What this role asks for
Standard for software engineering roles
Python
Common in software engineering postings at any company.
Read against Mercor's other open postings on this site.
The team: Core Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 22 open in Core Engineering. 1 was posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in September: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Python (12 of 22), LLM (10 of 22), PostgreSQL (8 of 22), GitHub (5 of 22), Kubernetes (5 of 22), Machine Learning (5 of 22), TypeScript (5 of 22)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Software Engineer, Robotics posted Sep 22
- Software Engineer, Platform posted Sep 4
- Member of Technical Staff, Agentic Systems posted Sep 1
- Product Engineer, Talent Experience posted Aug 31
- Software Engineer, Agents posted Aug 27
- Software Engineer, Frontier Data Products posted Aug 27
- Member of Technical Staff, Mercor Enterprise Platform posted Aug 21
- Product Engineer, Studio Platform posted Aug 18
- Member of Technical Staff, Enterprise Evals Platform posted Aug 15
- Member of Technical Staff, Deeptune Environments posted Aug 10
- Software Engineer, Frontier Data Products posted Aug 7
- Member of Technical Staff, Backend posted Jul 25
- Research Engineer, Real Environments posted Jul 24
- Software Engineer, Backend posted Jul 14
- Software Engineer, Identity posted Jul 1
- Software Engineer, Machine Learning posted Jun 30
- Machine Learning Engineer, Frontier Data Products posted May 29
- Data Engineer posted May 7
- Software Engineer, Platform posted Apr 23
- Software Engineer, Automation posted Mar 12
- Software Engineer, Agents posted Sep 18
From the team and dates on Mercor's own job board.
See Software Engineer salaries in San Francisco →
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