Staff Software Engineer
About the role
Staff Backend Engineer role at FirstWork, an AI-driven HR operations platform. Hands-on architecture position focusing on agentic AI, scale, and multi-tenant systems. Requires leadership, cross-functional collaboration, and hands-on coding to drive core domain infrastructure and product capabilities.
Responsibilities
- Take end-to-end ownership of core domain: the agent runtime, the compliance and rules engine, the worker data model, or integrations.
- Push LLMs and agentic AI deeper into the product, and draw the line between what belongs in inference and what belongs in deterministic, auditable rules.
- Design the safety properties of agents that act in external systems, including idempotency, retries, isolation, and human escalation.
- Build the evaluation and accuracy infrastructure that makes AI decisions defensible in a regulated context.
- Keep inference viable at scale through model routing, caching, and batching, with cost per transaction as a tracked metric.
- Design data models with long-lived constraints, including audit logs, compliance clocks, and credential lifecycles.
- Drive the data architecture roadmap: read replicas, logical sharding, CDC-fed projections, and a search tier.
- Enforce multi-tenancy, permissions, and audit trails as invariants guaranteed by design and by test.
- Act as a technical lead through design review, incident command, and mentoring senior engineers.
- Work directly with product and customers to turn bespoke requests into platform capabilities.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
- Experience at a company that outgrew its first architecture, and a hand in scaling it incrementally.
- Deep relational database expertise, including diagnosing saturation in production.
- Production experience with LLM or vision-model systems: evaluation, accuracy, cost control, and fallback design.
- Strong distributed systems judgement across idempotency, retries, queue lag, and partial failure.
- Experience with multi-tenant, configurable products.
- A measurement-first approach: profiles and traces before opinions.
- Influence through clear writing and demonstrated results.
Skills
About FirstWork
Rippling for seasonal workers
Firstwork is a next-generation HR platform designed specifically for companies with dynamic workforce needs. Our mission is to streamline and automate key HR processes to help businesses operate more efficiently and effectively. What We Do (for now): (1) Smart Onboarding 📋: Our platform simplifies the onboarding process by automating the collection and verification of credentials, such as right-to-work documents, insurance forms and driver’s licenses. This reduces administrative burden and accelerates the time-to-productivity for new hires. (2) AI-Assisted Activation 🤖: Leveraging AI, we enhance communication and messaging for new hires, ensuring they receive timely and relevant information. This helps in better engagement and faster integration into their roles. (3) Perpetual Compliance ✅: Our system uses AI and OCR technology to continuously monitor and ensure compliance with various regulatory requirements. This includes tracking expirations of critical documents, updating records, and generating compliance reports, thus reducing the risk of penalties and legal issues.
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