Senior Software Engineer

MeritFirst • Austin, TX

4d • Onsite

About The Position

MeritFirst builds objective, efficient ways for people to demonstrate critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability, and execution, helping companies hire based on demonstrated ability rather than pedigree. The product is intended to provide a fair, trustworthy signal for candidates and employers, supported by careful product judgment, rigorous measurement, and reliable, explainable software.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will own major parts of the product end to end, from the candidate experience and assessment engine to employer workflows and evaluation. You will work on a small team and directly with the founder, candidates, and customers. The work is not fully specified in advance: you will decide what to build, ship an initial version, observe its performance, and improve it. You will also improve the engineering team through system architecture, code review, and mentorship. The company uses AI extensively, while expecting engineers to understand and explain every line of code they deliver.

Current product work includes hands-on challenges that show how candidates work with AI, voice and video interviews, auditable scoring that candidates can trust, and integrations with employers' existing hiring tools. The stack is TypeScript, Next.js, Postgres, and Vercel. The role is onsite in Austin, Texas, on an engineering team of three.

Requirements

• Experience leading the design and delivery of significant production systems and operating them over time.
• Deep expertise in one part of the technology stack and ability to work across the rest.
• Strong debugging skills, including forming hypotheses, following evidence, and investigating issues beneath frameworks and libraries.
• Ability to choose between the simplest workable solution and investing in a stronger foundation.
• Experience building software before LLMs and a careful approach to AI-generated code.
• Experience improving other engineers through design reviews, code reviews, or mentorship.
• Clear communication, willingness to disagree directly, and ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-engineers.

Responsibilities

• Own a high-leverage product area end to end, including its design, code, production health, and roadmap.
• Turn ambiguous problems into written technical designs, make tradeoffs explicit, and align the team before major work begins.
• Build consistent, auditable, and difficult-to-game evaluations; use AI where it measurably helps and build evaluations to demonstrate its value.
• Connect assessment results, employer decisions, and on-the-job outcomes to improve the product's predictive ability over time.
• Treat reliability, security, and privacy as product requirements from the beginning.
• Improve engineering quality through instructive code reviews, mentoring, and helping hire future engineers.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed