Senior Software Engineer

MeritFirst • Austin, TX

7d • Onsite

About The Position

MeritFirst builds tools that help companies evaluate candidates based on demonstrated ability rather than credentials. The Senior Software Engineer will own major parts of the product end to end, spanning the candidate experience, assessment engine, employer workflows, and evaluation. Working on a small team and directly with the founder, candidates, and customers, this engineer will help decide what to build, deliver initial versions, observe how they perform, and improve them. The role also contributes to the team’s technical quality through system architecture, code review, and mentorship.

The product includes hands-on challenges that show how candidates work with AI, voice and video interviews, auditable scoring, and integrations with employers’ existing hiring tools. The engineering stack is TypeScript, Next.js, Postgres, and Vercel. MeritFirst uses AI heavily, while requiring engineers to understand, explain, test, and trust the code they ship. The position is onsite in Austin, Texas.

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 judge when to build the simplest workable solution and when to invest in a foundation.
• Experience building software before LLMs and willingness to scrutinize AI-written code as code from an unfamiliar contributor.
• Experience improving other engineers’ work through design review, code review, or mentorship.
• Clear communication, direct disagreement, and ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-engineers.
• Ability and willingness to remain hands-on in code and maintain systems after shipping.
• Comfort with ambiguous requirements and a work environment that does not offer a predictable 9-to-5 schedule.

Responsibilities

• Own a high-leverage product area, including its design, code, production health, and roadmap.
• Lead technical design by turning ambiguous problems into written designs, making tradeoffs explicit, and aligning the team before major work begins.
• Build consistent, auditable, and difficult-to-game evaluations; use AI where it measurably helps and build evaluations to validate it.
• Connect assessment results, employer decisions, and on-the-job outcomes to improve the product’s predictive ability.
• Treat reliability, security, and privacy as product requirements from the outset.
• Improve engineering quality through teaching code reviews, mentoring engineers, and helping hire future team members.

What This Job Offers

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