Staff 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 Staff Software Engineer (Backend) to architect and scale the systems powering our AI agents and help build new product capabilities with AI designed from the ground up.

In this role, you'll set the technical direction for core engineering domains and work closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to build intelligent systems that enterprise customers can configure, trust, and rely on.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll continue writing code while driving architecture decisions, solving complex distributed systems challenges, and influencing how our platform evolves.

You'll focus on scaling system throughput, latency, and data volume while ensuring our AI agents remain accurate, reliable, and cost-efficient as usage grows.

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 shape the architecture behind systems that directly impact how large enterprises hire, verify, onboard, and manage their frontline workforce.

What You'll Do

• Take end-to-end technical ownership of core engineering domains, including agent runtime, compliance and rules engines, worker data models, or integrations.

• Drive the adoption of LLMs and agentic AI across the product, determining where AI inference is appropriate and where deterministic, auditable rules are required.

• Architect reliable and safe AI agents that interact with external systems, with strong guarantees around idempotency, retries, isolation, and human escalation.

• Build evaluation and accuracy infrastructure to make AI-driven decisions reliable, measurable, and defensible in regulated environments.

• Optimize AI inference at scale through model routing, caching, batching, and cost-per-transaction improvements.

• Design robust data models supporting audit logs, compliance timelines, credential lifecycles, and long-term data integrity.

• Drive the data architecture roadmap, including read replicas, logical sharding, CDC-driven projections, and search infrastructure.

• Establish multi-tenancy, permissions, and audit trails as foundational architectural principles.

• Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, incident management, and mentoring senior engineers.

• Partner directly with product teams and customers to translate complex requirements into scalable platform capabilities.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of professional backend engineering experience.

• Experience working at a company that outgrew its initial architecture, with hands-on involvement in scaling systems incrementally.

• Deep expertise in relational databases, including diagnosing and resolving production performance and capacity bottlenecks.

• Production experience with LLM- or vision-model-powered systems, including evaluation, accuracy, cost optimization, and fallback strategies.

• Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including idempotency, retries, queue management, and handling partial failures.

• Experience designing and scaling multi-tenant, configurable products.

• A measurement-driven engineering approach, using profiling, metrics, and distributed tracing to guide technical decisions.

• Strong technical communication skills and the ability to influence engineering direction through clear writing and demonstrated results.

Nice to Have

• Experience building agentic systems where AI agents take real actions in external applications or systems.

• Experience with Temporal or other durable execution engines at production scale.

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and CDC pipelines powering read models and data projections.

• Experience with rules engines, policy-as-code, or workflow orchestration.

• Background in compliance, identity verification, payroll, fintech, or financial infrastructure.

• Experience evolving a single-vertical product into a platform supporting multiple industries.

• Experience working in an AI-first, fast-moving product environment.

• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude.

Why Join FirstWork?

• Shape the architecture: Set technical direction for critical platform domains and influence foundational engineering decisions.

• Build AI at enterprise scale: Work on production AI agents handling complex, real-world workflows across global markets.

• Solve challenging engineering problems: Tackle distributed systems, data architecture, reliability, and AI cost optimization.

• Drive meaningful technical impact: Your architectural decisions will directly influence product capabilities and platform scalability.

• Join at an exciting stage of growth: Help build the engineering foundations for FirstWork's next phase of expansion.

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.