Software Engineer - MeritFirst

8VC, Austin, TX

8VC has this job in 1 other place

Austin, TX

The role

APPLY HERE https://www.meritfirst.us/candidate/tests/40bfae94-dbf6-43fd-8ac3-b804eee7ad47

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.

All jobs

Software Engineer - MeritFirst

8VC, Austin, TX

8VC has this job in 1 other place

Austin, TX

The role

APPLY HERE https://www.meritfirst.us/candidate/tests/40bfae94-dbf6-43fd-8ac3-b804eee7ad47

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.

What you will do

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 improve rigorous assessments and realistic work challenges across many kinds of roles.
Own problems end to end. Move from understanding the user and shaping the product through system design, implementation, deployment, observation, and iteration. You will own outcomes, not tickets.
Turn difficult human workflows into excellent software. Work closely with assessment experts, operators, and users to understand what should be automated, what should remain human, and how the two should fit together.
Build evaluation systems worthy of trust. Make results consistent, interpretable, auditable, and resistant to gaming. Design appropriate human review, testing, and safeguards into systems that affect real careers.
Close the learning loop. Connect assessment performance, employer decisions, and on-the-job outcomes so the product becomes more useful and predictive over time.
Use AI where it earns its place. Apply models where they materially improve assessment creation, evaluation, or the candidate and employer experience - and build the evaluations and guardrails required to know whether they are actually working.
Make trust a technical requirement. Treat reliability, security, privacy, accessibility, and candidate experience as foundational product properties rather than cleanup work.
Strengthen the technical foundation. Improve architecture, testing, observability, performance, and developer velocity where the business requires it - without prematurely building infrastructure we do not yet need.
Set the engineering standard. Establish the technical judgment, operating habits, and quality bar that future engineers will inherit. Help us identify and recruit the people who should join you.

Software Engineer - MeritFirst

The role

Software Engineer - MeritFirst

The role

What you will do

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Who will thrive here

You will likely thrive here if

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Logistics

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8VC