Senior Software Engineer (Remote)

About FirstWork

FirstWork is an applied AI company building the next generation of workforce operations technology.

We work with companies across staffing, logistics, healthcare, and retail that manage large frontline workforces. These businesses deal with complex, highly manual processes involving hiring, onboarding, document verification, compliance, training, and ongoing workforce management.

We're using AI agents to automate these workflows, working alongside human teams and integrating with the systems businesses already use.

Having raised $15M in our Series A, led by Earlybird Venture Capital, bringing our total funding to $20M, we're entering an exciting phase of growth. With established enterprise customers and a growing product footprint, we're expanding beyond hiring and onboarding to build a comprehensive AI-powered workforce operations platform.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to take ownership of significant parts of our engineering platform and help build the AI capabilities powering our products.

You'll lead projects end to end, from technical design and architecture through implementation, deployment, and ongoing improvements. You'll work closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to solve complex technical challenges and deliver reliable, scalable systems.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys working on distributed systems, building production-grade backend infrastructure, and shipping AI-powered capabilities that solve real-world problems at scale.

What Makes This Opportunity Exciting?

• You'll be building and shipping AI capabilities that are already operating at enterprise scale:

• ~100,000 workers moving through our hiring and onboarding flows every week.

• 3.5 million API requests processed daily across the platform.

• Millions of document pages processed by AI agents every year.

• AI agents automating document verification, compliance workflows, and browser-based interactions across 40+ countries.

• You'll have the opportunity to work on systems that directly impact how large enterprises hire, verify, onboard, and manage their frontline workforce.

What You'll Do

• Own critical backend subsystems across document processing, workflow automation, compliance, communications, and integrations.

• Lead engineering projects from technical design through implementation and production rollout.

• Build and ship AI-powered capabilities, including document extraction, validation pipelines, and intelligent workflow automation.

• Develop AI agents capable of interacting with government and third-party portals through browser automation.

• Design and maintain scalable REST APIs and webhooks for customer integrations.

• Build reliable asynchronous workflows using orchestration and execution frameworks.

• Design efficient database schemas and data models for high-volume, multi-tenant applications.

• Optimize system performance, reliability, latency, and infrastructure costs.

• Collaborate with product and operations teams to translate customer requirements into scalable product solutions.

• Contribute to engineering best practices through code reviews, technical design discussions, and mentoring.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience.

• Experience owning and delivering complex software systems end to end.

• Strong understanding of SQL, relational databases, and data modelling.

• Solid fundamentals in distributed systems, asynchronous processing, queues, retries, and fault tolerance.

• Experience designing and building scalable backend architectures.

• Proven ability to lead technical projects and collaborate across engineering teams.

• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to navigate ambiguity.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Nice to Have

• Strong Python experience, particularly with Django and Django REST Framework.

• Experience building and deploying LLM- or ML-powered features in production.

• Familiarity with AI agents, agentic systems, and workflow orchestration frameworks.

• Experience with browser automation tools such as Playwright.

• Familiarity with Temporal, Celery, Airflow, or similar workflow engines.

• Experience with PostgreSQL, including indexing, partitioning, query optimization, and connection pooling.

• Experience building evaluation frameworks and optimizing LLM performance and costs.

• Background in HR tech, fintech, healthcare, payroll, compliance, or other regulated industries.

• Experience working in an AI-first product environment.

Why Join FirstWork?

• Build at the intersection of AI and real-world operations: Work on AI agents solving complex problems in a large, underserved market.

• Own meaningful engineering challenges: Take ownership of critical systems and influence architecture and product decisions.

• Work at enterprise scale: Build technology powering workforce operations for major global businesses.

• Join at an exciting stage of growth: Help shape the technology and engineering culture as we expand our platform.

Firstwork is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected status.