What are the responsibilities and job description for the Software Engineer position at MeritFirst?
Company Description
MeritFirst is on a mission to redefine how companies identify and unlock exceptional talent. By moving beyond traditional credentials and proxies, the company focuses on skill-based assessments. MeritFirst seeks to break down barriers in hiring to create a truly meritocratic approach, enabling organizations to discover capable people from all backgrounds. Our work is deeply rooted in building an inclusive talent system that aligns with America's strength of empowering diverse and exceptional individuals.
Role Description
This is a full-time, on-site role based in Austin, TX, for an AI/Software Engineer. If you are not in Austin and you take the assessment, we'll refer you to partner companies! You will design, develop, and deploy scalable AI-powered systems — from intelligent back-end services to model-integrated applications. Day to day, you'll build robust APIs and services that leverage large language models, implement agent architectures and tool-use patterns, and engineer the data and infrastructure layers that make AI features reliable at scale. You'll own problems end-to-end, move fast, and contribute to projects that push the boundary of what software can do autonomously. You'll participate in rigorous code reviews, evaluate emerging AI tooling and frameworks, and help establish best practices for building with — and on top of — rapidly evolving AI capabilities.
Qualifications
- Proficiency in TypeScript across the stack, with experience building back-end services, APIs, or orchestration layers in Node.js or similar runtimes
- Hands-on experience integrating LLMs into production systems — retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering, function calling, and agent architectures
- Strong software design instincts: you write modular, testable, maintainable code and care deeply about developer experience
- Familiarity with AI tooling ecosystems (e.g., LangChain, Vercel AI SDK, or equivalent) and a habit of staying current as the landscape shifts
- Excellent problem-solving ability with a bias toward shipping
- Experience with agile workflows, Git, and CI/CD pipelines; exposure to containerized deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) is a plus
- Strong communication skills — you can explain a model's trade-offs to a product manager as clearly as you can to another engineer
Challenge here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t8ITRYa-JvlIg-YnKldFOJyOUUG_X82Uan-5_jwOASE/edit?tab=t.0