Senior Software Engineer

America is strongest when ability can rise

The right person can change the trajectory of a team, a company, or an entire field. Yet most hiring still filters on what is easiest to read: the right degree, the right employer, the right network. Those are poor proxies for what someone can actually do. When they miss real ability, a company loses performance and an idea goes unbuilt.

MeritFirst builds objective, efficient ways for people to demonstrate critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability, and execution, so companies can hire on demonstrated ability rather than pedigree. For the worker, that means upward mobility. For the company, better performance. At scale, national growth.

The role

Our product has to produce a signal that deserves to influence real decisions about people. Candidates need to trust that they got a fair chance to show what they can do. Employers need to trust that the signal predicts performance better than the credentials they already use. Earning both takes careful product judgment, rigorous measurement, and software that is reliable and explainable.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will own major parts of that system end to end, from the candidate experience and assessment engine to employer workflows and evaluation. You will join a small team and work directly with our founder, candidates, and customers. Roadmaps here do not arrive fully specified. You'll decide what should exist, ship the first version, watch how it behaves, and improve it quickly. You will also make the engineers around you better through the systems you architect and the code you review.

We use AI heavily. However, if you can't reason about and explain each line of your code, your work isn't ready. Our standard is a system we understand, can explain, test, and trust.

What we're working on

• Hands-on challenges that show how candidates work with AI

• Voice and video interviews

• Scoring that employers can audit and candidates can trust

• Integrations with the hiring tools employers already use

Stack: TypeScript, Next.js, Postgres, and Vercel.

Engineering team size: 3.

Location: onsite in Austin, Texas.

What you'll do

• Own an area end to end. Early on, you'll take on one of our highest-leverage product areas: its design, code, production health, and roadmap.

• Lead technical design. Turn ambiguous problems into written designs, make the tradeoffs explicit, and align the team before the big work starts.

• Build evaluation worth trusting. Make results consistent, auditable, and hard to game. Use AI where it measurably helps, and build the evals that prove it.

• Close the learning loop. Connect assessment results, employer decisions, and on-the-job outcomes so the product gets more predictive over time.

• Treat trust as a technical requirement. Reliability, security, and privacy are product properties from day one.

• Raise the bar. Give code reviews that teach, mentor other engineers, and help hire the people who join next.

You'll thrive here if you

• Have led the design and delivery of significant production systems, and operated them long enough to live with your decisions.

• Have deep expertise in one part of the stack and can work across the rest.

• Debug relentlessly: form hypotheses, follow evidence, and dig beneath frameworks and libraries until you understand the issue.

• Know when to build the simplest thing that works vs. when to invest in a foundation.

• Have built software before LLMs and treat AI-written code like code from a stranger.

• Have made other engineers better through design review, code review, or mentorship.

• Communicate clearly, disagree directly, and can explain a technical tradeoff to a non-engineer.

This probably isn't the role if you

• Want requirements and architecture fully specified before you start.

• Want to lead others without staying hands-on in the code.

• Love building something new but lose interest in maintaining what you ship.

• Want a predictable 9-to-5.

• Are more excited by the idea of meritocracy, or by AI hype, than by the hard work of building something people can trust.

How we hire

Our process tests demonstrated ability, not pedigree or interview polish.

Some steps may be with AI and some without. We want to see your foundations, how you reason, and how you use modern tools without giving up judgment. Along the way, you'll use the MeritFirst product yourself.