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About the Role

MeritFirst is building the infrastructure to make objective, efficient ways for people to demonstrate critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability, and execution the default, helping companies hire based on demonstrated ability rather than pedigree alone. This role involves building the MeritFirst platform from first principles, working directly with the founder, product team, candidates, and employers to shape and build the system.

Responsibilities

Build the core product, creating candidate and employer experiences that make it easy to demonstrate ability, understand the resulting signal, and act on it.
Build a flexible assessment platform, developing primitives to create, deliver, evaluate, and continuously improve rigorous assessments and realistic work challenges.
Own problems end to end, moving from user understanding and product shaping through system design, implementation, deployment, observation, and iteration.
Turn difficult human workflows into excellent software, working closely with experts and users to determine automation and human integration.
Build evaluation systems worthy of trust, ensuring results are consistent, interpretable, auditable, and resistant to gaming.
Close the learning loop by connecting assessment performance, employer decisions, and on-the-job outcomes.
Use AI where it earns its place, applying models to improve assessment creation, evaluation, or user experience, and building required 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 needed.
Set the engineering standard by establishing technical judgment, operating habits, and quality bar for future engineers, and assisting in recruitment.

Requirements

Candidates must trust that they have a fair opportunity to demonstrate what they can do.
Employers must trust that the resulting signal predicts performance better than the credentials they already use.
Earning that trust requires exceptional product judgment, rigorous measurement, and software that is reliable, explainable, and built with care.
You will help determine what should exist, reduce ambiguous problems to their essential parts, ship the first version, observe how it behaves in the real world, and improve it quickly.
AI gives engineers extraordinary new leverage, and we intend to use it.
Our standard is not code that looks plausible or was produced quickly, but a system we understand, can explain, can test, and can trust.
We expect our engineering team to have deep technical foundations while using modern tools to multiply judgment not replace it.
You may have been an early engineer, technical founder, or senior individual contributor.
You may have built an ambitious product at a startup, owned a critical system at scale, made meaningful open-source contributions, or developed exceptional ability outside a conventional path.
Your exact background matters less than evidence of unusual technical ability, product judgment, and ownership.
You have built and operated meaningful production software, not only prototypes or narrowly bounded features.
You have exceptional technical foundations and can reason from first principles when existing abstractions stop helping.
You can move fluidly between shaping the product, designing the system, writing the code, reading unfamiliar code, and understanding what happens in production.
You have depth in at least one part of the stack and enough range to follow important problems wherever they lead.
You are an excellent debugger.
You combine speed with judgment.
You have strong product instincts and care deeply about the person on the other side of the screen.
You have built production software both with and without AI assistance.
You understand where AI tools create extraordinary leverage and where they can conceal shallow reasoning, brittle code, or false confidence.
You treat AI-generated code like code written by someone you have never worked with: inspect it, test it, and take full responsibility for it.
You communicate clearly, disagree directly, and make technical tradeoffs legible to non-engineers.
You want your work to matter in the real world and care deeply about our mission.
Our hiring process is designed to surface demonstrated ability, not reward pedigree or interview polish.
We care far more about what you can do rather than where you went to school or which logos appear on your resume.
We may ask you to work both with and without AI assistance.
We are not testing nostalgia or typing speed - we want to understand your technical foundations, how you reason, and how you use modern tools without surrendering judgment.

Skills

Critical thinking
Problem-solving
Adaptability
Execution
Product judgment
Rigorous measurement
Software reliability
Software explainability
Software care
AI
Technical foundations
Modern tools
Debugging
Speed
Judgment
Product instincts
Communication
Direct disagreement
Technical tradeoffs
Operating production software
Reasoning from first principles
System design
Implementation
Deployment
Observation
Iteration
AI assistance

Experience Level

Early engineer
Technical founder
Senior individual contributor

About the Company

MeritFirst is building the infrastructure to make objective, efficient ways for people to demonstrate critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability, and execution the default.
We create objective, efficient ways for people to demonstrate critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability, and execution - and help companies hire based on demonstrated ability rather than pedigree alone.
For the worker, that means upward mobility. For the company, better performance. At scale, it can mean national growth.
MeritFirst’s product has to do something much harder than move information around: it has to create a signal that deserves to influence consequential decisions about people.
We’re looking for Software Engineers to help build that system from first principles.
This is not a role where a roadmap arrives fully specified.
We intend to use AI to give engineers extraordinary new leverage.
Our standard is a system we understand, can explain, can test, and can trust.
We expect our engineering team to have deep technical foundations while using modern tools to multiply judgment not replace it.
We practice what we preach: our hiring process is designed to surface demonstrated ability, not reward pedigree or interview polish.
We want to understand your technical foundations, how you reason, and how you use modern tools without surrendering judgment.
You’ll experience the MeritFirst product firsthand, giving you a chance to evaluate what we’re building - and whether you’re excited to help shape it!