Software Engineer

MeritFirst is building infrastructure that lets people demonstrate critical thinking, problem‑solving, adaptability, and execution so companies can hire based on ability rather than pedigree. The platform creates a trustworthy signal that influences consequential hiring decisions, aiming to boost upward mobility, company performance, and ultimately national growth.

About the role

You will work directly with the founder, product team, candidates, and employers to shape and build the MeritFirst platform—from the candidate experience and assessment engine to employer workflows, evaluation systems, and the underlying infrastructure. The roadmap is not fully specified; you will define what should exist, ship early versions, observe real‑world behavior, and iterate quickly.

Responsibilities

• Build the core product and create candidate and employer experiences that make it easy to demonstrate ability, understand the resulting signal, and act on it.
• Develop a flexible assessment platform, creating primitives that allow the delivery, evaluation, and continuous improvement of rigorous assessments and realistic work challenges across many roles.
• Own problems end‑to‑end: from understanding users and shaping the product, through system design, implementation, deployment, observation, and iteration.
• Turn difficult human workflows into excellent software by collaborating with assessment experts, operators, and users.
• Build evaluation systems that are consistent, interpretable, auditable, and resistant to gaming, incorporating appropriate human review, testing, and safeguards.
• Close the learning loop by connecting assessment performance, employer decisions, and on‑the‑job outcomes to make the product more predictive over time.
• Apply AI where it materially improves assessment creation, evaluation, or the candidate and employer experience, and build the necessary evaluations and guardrails.
• Make trust a technical requirement, treating reliability, security, privacy, accessibility, and candidate experience as foundational product properties.
• Strengthen the technical foundation by improving architecture, testing, observability, performance, and developer velocity where the business needs it—without building premature infrastructure.
• Set the engineering standard by establishing technical judgment, operating habits, and a quality bar that future engineers will inherit, and help identify and recruit new team members.

Who will thrive here

• Built and operated meaningful production software, not just prototypes or narrowly bounded features.
• Exceptional technical foundations and the ability to reason from first principles when existing abstractions fall short.
• Fluid movement between shaping the product, designing the system, writing code, reading unfamiliar code, and understanding production behavior.
• Depth in at least one part of the stack with enough range to follow important problems wherever they lead.
• Excellent debugging skills: forming hypotheses, following evidence, and persisting until the root cause is understood.
• Combination of speed and judgment—knowing when to build the simplest thing that works, when to invest in a foundation, and how to avoid both perfectionism and careless debt.
• Strong product instincts and deep empathy for the person on the other side of the screen.
• Experience building production software both with and without AI assistance, understanding where AI provides leverage and where it can hide shallow reasoning.
• Treat AI‑generated code like code from an unknown collaborator: inspect it, test it, and take full responsibility for it.
• Clear communication, direct disagreement, and making technical trade‑offs legible to non‑engineers.
• Desire for work that matters in the real world and alignment with MeritFirst’s mission.

May not be a fit if

• You need fully specified requirements, architecture, and priorities before beginning work.
• You prefer to stay within a narrow technical layer and avoid product, user research, support, data, or operations responsibilities.
• You measure engineering quality primarily by code volume, feature count, or how quickly something can be generated.
• You rely on frameworks or AI tools without being able to explain, debug, and own the systems they help produce.
• You design elaborate architecture before understanding the problem or seeing evidence that scale requires it.
• You enjoy only greenfield building and lose interest in operating, repairing, and improving shipped software.
• You want an established engineering organization with mature infrastructure and a settled operating playbook.
• You seek a predictable 9‑to‑5 schedule; the role may require long days and intense effort.
• You are more interested in the idea of meritocracy or AI hype than in the difficult technical work required to build trustworthy systems.

Hiring process

Our process is designed to surface demonstrated ability, not reward pedigree. It includes a short initial screen, a conversation with a team member, a role‑relevant technical exercise (with and without AI assistance), and final‑round discussions focused on technical judgment, product sense, ownership, and mutual fit. You will also experience the MeritFirst product firsthand, giving you a chance to evaluate what we’re building and decide if you’re excited to help shape it.