Senior Software Engineer
About the role
Senior Software Engineer at FirstWork, a YC-backed applied AI company building an HR operations platform for frontline hiring. Remote (US). The role focuses on owning significant platform subsystems and shipping AI capabilities that run on top of the platform, leading projects end to end from design through rollout, and mentoring others.
Responsibilities
- Own a subsystem end to end document processing, workflow automation, compliance rules, communications, or integrations; and lead the projects inside it from design doc through rollout.
- Ship AI agent capability into production: extraction and validation pipelines, confidence handling, human review routing, and the feedback loop that raises accuracy document type by document type.
- Build AI browsing agents that drive government and third-party portals through the browser, where the only interface is the UI.
- Own accuracy and cost for the AI you ship, across prompts, structured output, evaluation, model selection, and spend per document.
- Design and evolve the REST APIs and webhooks that customer ATS, HR, and payroll integrations run on.
- Write durable async workflows in Temporal for automations, AI jobs, and bulk actions, built so that a retry is always safe.
- Design schema and data models that hold up as tenants, volume, and product surface grow.
- Improve latency and throughput with production evidence: profile it, fix it, prove the win.
- Raise the engineering bar around you through design review, code review, and mentoring.
- Work directly with product and operations to turn a customer’s real process into product.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience, including a system you owned end to end.
- Strong SQL and relational data modelling: you design schema before code, and you read query plans when it counts.
- Solid distributed systems fundamentals across queues, async workers, idempotency, retries, and partial failure.
- A track record of leading a project across several engineers and landing it.
- Care for correctness in multi-tenant systems, where every query stays scoped to a single customer.
- Clear written communication: design docs, pull requests, and incident writeups others can follow.
- Comfort with ambiguity, and the judgement to define a problem alongside solving it.
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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