Backend Engineer

About the Role

• Mercor is partnering with a leading AI research lab to support a Frontier Code Agents project.
• Contributors help evaluate and improve frontier AI coding models through structured technical assessments.
• The work focuses on realistic software engineering workflows and model evaluation rather than traditional software development.
• Spots are limited and filling quickly on a first come, first serve basis.

What You'll Do

• Use frontier AI coding agents to complete and evaluate complex engineering tasks.
• Review model-generated code for correctness, quality, maintainability, and performance.
• Identify bugs, edge cases, and failure modes in model outputs.
• Compare outputs from multiple frontier models and assess their strengths and weaknesses.
• Apply professional engineering judgment to realistic backend engineering scenarios.

Time Commitment

• Sprint based project that runs in 12-24 hour stretches based on client requirement.

Compensation

• $400 per accepted task.
• Typical tasks take approximately 2–3 hours after ramp-up.
• Compensation is tied to accepted work.

Who Should Apply

• 2+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Experience building APIs, distributed systems, microservices, backend platforms, or databases.
• Regular use of AI coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, or similar tools.
• Ability to evaluate model-generated code and identify bugs, edge cases, and architectural tradeoffs.
• Experience working on large-scale production systems is preferred.