Payments Engineer
Mercor · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
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.
Payments is the core infrastructure of our marketplace, not a back-office function. As our AI systems scale to evaluate, place, and compensate millions of workers across geographies, we are investing in making our financial systems deterministic, observable, and resilient because the models that route talent are only as good as the infrastructure that pays them. In a matter of months, we've gone from moving hundreds of thousands of dollars to hundreds of millions across our platform: what used to work at $200K won't work at $200M.
The Team You Will Join
The mission of the Payments group at Mercor is to be the financial and commercial backbone of the company.
We ensure that:
Money moves deterministically and reliably at scale
Failures are surfaced proactively, not reactively
Ledger, payout, and settlement systems are observable end-to-end
Root causes are fixed, not patched
Automation replaces manual intervention wherever possible
We operate at the intersection of Engineering, Finance, Product, Ops, and Fraud. Our mandate is to transform payments from manual orchestration into resilient financial infrastructure.
The Role
This role exists to help build the financial backbone that supports the next 1000x. We are looking for a senior engineer to help harden and scale Mercor’s payments platform.
You will work on:
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
This role requires someone who understands that payments infrastructure is both a technical and financial system, where correctness matters as much as uptime.
Why This Is a Big Role
We’ve grown from ~$200K in payment volume to ~$200M in a short window. The systems weren’t designed for this scale, and that’s exactly why this role matters. If you like building planes mid-flight, this will feel familiar. We are no longer building “payment features.” We are designing sustainable financial infrastructure for a rocketship. If that sounds energizing, keep reading.
What You’ll Actually Do
You’ll be working at the core of Mercor, scaling the core systems used by thousands of experts working on the frontier of AI.
That means:
Automating payout orchestration (no more human-triggered scripts)
Building a real operational ledger (immutable, auditable, boringly correct)
Designing settlement ingestion + reconciliation pipelines
Improving observability across payout → processor → bank flows
Eliminating recurring payment bugs at the root cause
Reducing manual treasury overhead
Abstracting processor dependencies so we’re not locked in
If you want to join a rocket ship and build the systems that let it keep accelerating, this is that role.
What We’re Looking For
We are seeking engineers who embody an operational mindset and system-level thinking, prioritizing reliability, correctness, and automation.
Experience & Domain Expertise: 6+ years in building scalable backend systems, with a strong preference for experience in high-stakes domains such as payments, fintech, billing, or financial infrastructure.
Must Haves:
Backend Expertise: 3+ years of industry experience in backend/platform engineering (or equivalent), including ownership of production systems.
Payment Infrastructure Expertise: Demonstrated ability to integrate with and manage third-party payment gateways (e.g., Stripe, Adyen) and/or direct banking APIs.
Compliance and Security: Understanding of financial regulations, including adherence to PCI-DSS, and the secure handling and encryption of sensitive banking and customer data.
Technical Proficiency: 3+ years of professional experience 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, k8s, etc..
Operational Excellence: Proven ability to manage and operate production systems under significant load. This includes balancing the velocity of development with maximum reliability, evidenced by a commitment to detailed observability and sophisticated payment agents.
Mindset: Comfortable working with high intensity in fast-growing, ambiguous environments. Thinks in terms of systems and strategic solutions, not just individual tickets.
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