Senior Backend Engineer

**Merciv** Senior Backend Engineer; $160K – $240K + Equity (~25% of base/yr) + Bonus; New York City (On-site)

**About Company** Merciv is an applied AI and data analytics company backed by $14M in seed funding and already driving 8-figure gross margin improvements for Fortune 500 retailers. After nearly two years in stealth, the company is launching publicly with a platform that connects fragmented enterprise data into a single intelligence layer for faster decisions and automated workflows.

Its product uses a production graph RAG system to connect temporal, sentiment, and consumer data at scale. Merciv starts with research and insights teams, then expands into marketing, innovation, supply chain, and manufacturing. Engineers joining now will have outsized influence on architecture, product direction, and culture.

**About the Role** Merciv is hiring a senior backend engineer to add experienced backend capacity as enterprise onboarding accelerates. The role focuses on two priorities: scaling the platform for significantly higher usage and building new roadmap features with architecture that lasts for years.

You’ll work across the graph database layer, API infrastructure, data pipelines with concurrency at scale, and new feature development. This is a hands-on DRI role for a senior IC who can own systems end-to-end, think clearly about architecture, and stay deeply engaged in implementation.

**Responsibilities** - Scale backend systems to support growing enterprise usage - Deliver durable architecture for new roadmap features - Own APIs, data pipelines, and graph-backed backend systems - Improve reliability, performance, and observability under high throughput - Partner with ML engineers to productionize AI-driven workflows - Shape backend architecture and engineering standards as the team grows

**Required Skills** - Build backend systems at scale with 5+ years' experience - Write production Python confidently; Go experience is a plus - Design distributed systems and microservices for reliability and growth - Work across SQL, NoSQL, and large-scale data processing - Operate with ownership in startups or small, fast-moving teams

**Bonus Skills**

- Experience with graph databases (major plus — core to Merciv's stack) - Experience with Go - Familiarity with RAG architectures and the broader GenAI landscape - Experience with real-time data processing, streaming technologies, and concurrency at scale - Understanding of ML/AI concepts, particularly in forecasting and NLP - Kubernetes and container orchestration experience

**Logistical Info**

- Location: New York City - 4 days/week in office, engineering typically takes Fridays flexible/remote. Additional case-by-case flexibility available; in-person culture with understanding, not a hard-and-fast 5-day rule - Compensation: $160,000 – $240,000 base + equity (~25% of salary/yr, vesting) + bonus - Number of openings: Up to 2 (likely 1 senior + 1 mid-to-senior; strong candidates who aren't fully senior may be considered at a slightly lower level or funneled to full-stack) - **Other:** - Health, dental, vision, 401k - Home office stipend, flexible PTO - Ground-floor equity at a well-funded seed-stage company Strong team culture: weekly activities, team events, zero attrition to date

**Ideal Background** - Senior backend engineer from a high-agency, innovation-driven company — someone at the sweet spot of their career where they're senior enough to think architecturally but still excited to be hands-on implementing. - Target companies: Palantir (especially engineers with ontology/graph experience), Cognition, Harvey, Rogo, Cursor, and similar verticalized AI intelligence layers. - Also strong: founding engineers or small-team engineers from applied AI startups, or engineers from high-scale consumer/fintech platforms (trading systems, etc.) who want to move into AI infrastructure. - Big tech (Meta, Google, OpenAI, IBM, Scale) is acceptable only if the candidate was on a newer product area within a small team — not maintaining legacy systems. - Startup or small company experience is strongly preferred but not a hard must — the signal is whether they've had to think at a higher level and build new things with real ownership. - Priority: this is Merciv's highest-priority hire. **Example Candidates:**

**Green Flags** - High agency, humility, and strong technical judgment - Clearly hands-on while thinking well about architecture - Startup or small-team ownership building net-new systems - Builds side projects, open source, or personal experiments - Genuine excitement for graph databases, graph RAG, and agentic AI

**Red Flags** - Senior title but no longer hands-on - Low-agency resume experience maintaining narrow-scope systems - No recent coding experience without side projects - Lacks Python proficiency for backend work - Remote-only preference; unwilling to work in NYC office - Pure infrastructure background without application backend experience

**Interview Process** 1. Recruiter Screen 2. Intro Call (30 min) 3. Technical Screen (45-60 min) 4. Onsite (4 hours) 5. Offer