Software Engineer - MeritFirst

Apply Here America is strongest when ability can rise The right person can change the trajectory of a team, a company, or an entire field. But most hiring systems are built to avoid mistakes, not to discover extraordinary upside. They rely on the credentials that are easiest to read: the right degree, the right previous employer, or the right personal network. These filters, while convenient, are often very poor proxies for what someone can actually do. When exceptional ability is missed, the loss is larger than one denied opportunity. A company loses performance. Coworkers lose a force multiplier. Ideas and businesses that could have existed never get built. A country that mistakes pedigree for ability does not merely distribute opportunity unfairly, it leaves growth on the table. History suggests that better talent allocation has been a major source of American growth. When capable people reach the work where they can contribute most, workers rise, companies become more productive, and the benefits can spread through new ideas, stronger teams, families, and communities. MeritFirst is building the infrastructure to make that 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. 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. We’re looking for Software Engineers to help build that system from first principles. You will work directly with our 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 infrastructure beneath them. This is not a role where a roadmap arrives fully specified. 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. One day you may be designing a new assessment experience. The next, you may be debugging an edge case in production, working through an evaluation methodology with an assessment expert, simplifying an employer workflow , or deciding which manual process should become software. AI gives engineers extraordinary new leverage, and we intend to use it. But our standard is not code that looks plausible or was produced quickly. It 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.   What you’ll build over time The responsibilities below describe the full mandate of the engineering function over time, not a day-one checklist for one person. You will begin by taking ownership of the highest-leverage product and technical problems, shipping directly to users, and developing a deep understanding of where software can most improve the candidate-to-hire loop . From there, you will help build the systems and engineering team that allow MeritFirst to scale. Build the core product. Create candidate and employer experiences that make it easy to demonstrate ability, understand the resulting signal, and act on it. Build a flexible assessment platform. Develop the primitives that allow us to create, deliver, evaluate, and continuously