Pouria Pezeshkian

I build the systems other teams build on.

Engineering leader focused on reliable backend systems and infrastructure at scale. Currently at Mercor; previously Uber. Based in San Francisco.

Selected work

Mercor, 2025

Rebuilding Contracts under hypergrowth

Joined the Contracts team as an engineer while the service was failing under a sudden surge in volume and bottlenecking the company. I rearchitected its highest-volume paths in one week, with zero production regressions within the rewrite's scope, and set the SLOs the team ran on afterward.

The system went on to support roughly 20x contract volume, and I was promoted to Head of Engineering for Contracts.

Read the engineering story on Mercor's blog

Uber, 2018 to 2022

Qualifying data-center hardware with production-like benchmarks

Architected and led the framework Uber uses to qualify new server types, kernel upgrades, and configuration changes before they reach production. I built the proof of concept in five weeks and aligned more than 20 engineers across teams around it.

It replaced ad hoc manual benchmarking as the qualification gate, and Uber has since published it as Ceilometer.

Read Uber's write-up of Ceilometer

How I lead

Standards that outlast me. I wrote Mercor's idempotency standard and its code quality framework (now enforced by review bots), designed the Go service scaffold adopted for all new services, and turned our team's SLOs into Datadog-as-code used across the org.
Small teams, high leverage. As Head of Engineering for Contracts, I ran a revenue-critical service through a reorg with a three-person team, including an engineer I hired, while holding 99.9%+ reliability.
Technical direction for larger teams. Today I'm tech lead and co-architect for an eight-engineer team building a new platform in Mercor's Applied AI org, setting the architecture and driving execution alongside our engineering manager.

Experience

Years	Organization	Role
2025 to now	Mercor	Applied AI; previously Head of Engineering, Contracts
2023 to 2025	One Verifi	Founding engineer: sole backend author through production
2018 to 2022	Uber	Tech lead, infrastructure and driver teams
2017 to 2018	WonderBeam	Co-founder, two-hour consumer delivery
2014 to 2016	Nebula Instruments	Founder and CTO, hardware; two patent publications
2012 to 2014	Agilent	Production engineer

Education

Degree	Institution	Field
M.S.	Carnegie Mellon University	Information Networking (Computer Science), 2016 to 2018
B.S., cum laude	Cornell University	Electrical and Computer Engineering

Contact

I'm always glad to talk about infrastructure, reliability, and building engineering teams that ship fast without breaking production.

Email pouria.pezeshkian@gmail.com or find me on LinkedIn.