{"id":1011172,"url":"https://alion.io/job/firstwork-staff-software-engineer","title":"Staff Software Engineer","company":{"id":2778,"name":"FirstWork","domain":"firstwork.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/firstwork","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":31000,"max_usd":81000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_cell","sample_n":23},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-04T10:00:27Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-04","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T20:25:08Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":43,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":43},"description":"FirstWork is building the next generation of agentic AI products for frontline hiring, the work that gets roughly 80% of the world's workforce hired, verified, and paid. We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to architect the systems that let those agents run at the next order of magnitude, and to build the new product lines we are launching with AI designed-in from the start.\nIn this role, you'll set the technical direction for a core domain and work closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to get intelligent systems into a shape customers can configure and rely on. This is a hands-on architecture role: you'll still write code, and you'll see your decisions tested against live enterprise volume. The challenges ahead are scaling throughput, latency, and data volume as usage compounds, and keeping AI agents accurate, reliable, and economical as that happens.\nThe scale we run at\n~50,000 workers a week move through our hiring and onboarding flows.\n\n2.5 million API requests a day across the platform.\n\nMillions of document pages a year processed by AI agents, across 40+ countries and a dozen-plus languages.\n\nGlobal staffing, logistics, healthcare, marketplace, and employment platforms across the US, UK, EU, LATAM, and India.\n\nBilling on work performed, per document validated and per agent action executed, which makes product design, cost per unit, and gross margin one conversation.\n\nWhat you'll do\nTake end-to-end ownership of core domain: the agent runtime, the compliance and rules engine, the worker data model, or integrations.\n\nPush LLMs and agentic AI deeper into the product, and draw the line between what belongs in inference and what belongs in deterministic, auditable rules.\n\nDesign the safety properties of agents that act in external systems, including idempotency, retries, isolation, and human escalation.\n\nBuild the evaluation and accuracy infrastructure that makes AI decisions defensible in a regulated context.\n\nKeep inference viable at scale through model routing, caching, and batching, with cost per transaction as a tracked metric.\n\nDesign data models with long-lived constraints, including audit logs, compliance clocks, and credential lifecycles.\n\nDrive the data architecture roadmap: read replicas, logical sharding, CDC-fed projections, and a search tier.\n\nEnforce multi-tenancy, permissions, and audit trails as invariants guaranteed by design and by test.\n\nAct as a technical lead through design review, incident command, and mentoring senior engineers.\n\nWork directly with product and customers to turn bespoke requests into platform capabilities.\n\nWhat we need\n8+ years of professional backend engineering experience.\n\nExperience at a company that outgrew its first architecture, and a hand in scaling it incrementally.\n\nDeep relational database expertise, including diagnosing saturation in production.\n\nProduction experience with LLM or vision-model systems: evaluation, accuracy, cost control, and fallback design.\n\nStrong distributed systems judgement across idempotency, retries, queue lag, and partial failure.\n\nExperience with multi-tenant, configurable products.\n\nA measurement-first approach: profiles and traces before opinions.\n\nInfluence through clear writing and demonstrated results.\n\nNice to have\nBuilt agentic systems where an agent takes real action in an external system.\n\nTemporal or another durable execution engine at production scale.\n\nEvent-driven architecture and CDC pipelines feeding read stores.\n\nRules engines, policy-as-code, or workflow orchestration.\n\nCompliance, identity, payroll, or financial infrastructure background.\n\nExperience platformizing a single-vertical product for additional verticals.\n\nExperience in an AI-first, fast-moving product environment.\n\nFamiliarity with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude.\n\nAbout FirstWork\nFirstWork is an applied AI company building the HR operations platform behind frontline hiring, the largest, least automated, and most heavily regulated labour market in the world. One system carries a worker from application through onboarding, compliance verification, training, and payroll, for hundreds of enterprise customers.\nWe are AI-native. Our document agents read and validate credentials against policy. Our browsing agents drive government portals through the browser, where the only interface is the UI. Our voice and conversational agents screen and follow up with candidates. Our rule engines adjudicate compliance decisions and produce the audit trail behind them. Our agents are doing regulated work in production today.\nFirstwork is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected status.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4760,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"India","iso":"IN","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Agents","HR & Recruiting AI","HR & Payroll Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-17T20:04:53Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":22,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.639,"p_room":0.35,"age_days":42,"expected_fill_days":7,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/firstwork-staff-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/firstwork-staff-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T21:12:38Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":5667,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2778},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2778"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Ffirstwork-staff-software-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Ffirstwork-staff-software-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Ffirstwork-staff-software-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/firstwork-staff-software-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Ffirstwork-staff-software-engineer"}]}