Backend Engineer (Coding Agent Experience)

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.