Software Engineer, Identity

Mercor•San Francisco, CA

1d•$150,000 - $325,000•Onsite

About The Position

Mercor's identity infrastructure is unlike anything else in the Valley. Our enterprise Slack alone spans thousands of workspaces and tens of thousands of channels — with over 63,000 users today, the vast majority of whom are contractors and experts, not employees. That number is on track to hit 100,000. Managing access, identity, and permissions at that scale, across a global expert network spanning every client project we run, is one of the hardest distributed systems problems we have. This team is led by Mercor's first engineer. It operates with a high degree of ownership: you'll take requirements directly from operations, design the system, and ship it. There's no one handing you a spec. The problems are novel, the scale is real, and the team has a strong track record of bringing in sharp product engineers — regardless of prior security background — and watching them thrive.

Requirements

Strong product engineering fundamentals — you've built and operated systems in production, you care about correctness and reliability, and you're comfortable owning scope without a lot of hand-holding
Large-scale distributed systems experience — this is the most identifiable signal on a resume and a strong filter; the problems here are genuinely unprecedented in scale
Security-minded thinking — not a formal background necessarily, but the instinct to ask "how does this break, and what are the consequences?" when designing a system
Adaptability — we don't want someone who will come in and replicate what they've done before; Mercor's landscape is unique and requires genuine intellectual flexibility

Responsibilities

Talk directly with ops teams to understand business requirements, then translate them into large-scale distributed systems that are designed with security in mind from the start
Build and scale the infrastructure that manages expert identity and access across thousands of Slack workspaces, enterprise groups, and HR systems — systems that already operate at a scale most engineers never encounter
Own your scope end to end: define the approach, build it, and iterate on it as requirements evolve
Design for the security implications of what you're building — not auditing after the fact, but thinking through how gaps in system design compound at scale
Work across authentication, authorization, provisioning, and directory sync as the expert network continues to grow