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 Software Engineer (Backend) to design and build AI-powered product features that carry a worker from application to their first day on the job.

In this role, you'll build and own AI agents running in production across document processing, browser automation, voice, and conversational experiences. You'll collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and engineers building our AI infrastructure.

This is a hands-on product engineering role where you'll own features end to end, ship frequently, and see your work operate at real enterprise scale. You'll be working on production code, solving real-world problems, and building technology used by thousands of businesses and workers.

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

• Build and ship AI-powered product features using LLMs, document agents, and agentic workflows.

• Develop backend services and APIs supporting model inference, orchestration, and tool execution.

• Implement document extraction and validation pipelines that process real-world documents and automatically populate product data.

• Build AI browsing agents that interact with government and third-party portals through browser automation.

• Develop conversational and voice agents that screen and follow up with candidates over phone, SMS, and WhatsApp.

• Build and debug durable asynchronous workflows using Temporal for automations, AI jobs, and bulk actions.

• Design and evolve REST APIs and webhooks for customer ATS, HR, and payroll integrations.

• Handle the production realities of AI, including prompt design, structured outputs, retries, evaluation, and cost optimization.

• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code while participating in code and design reviews.

• Improve system performance, reliability, and scalability using production data.

What We're Looking For

• 3–5 years of professional backend engineering experience.

• Strong Python experience, particularly with Django and Django REST Framework or an equivalent framework.

• Hands-on experience integrating LLMs or ML-powered features into a live product.

• Strong SQL skills and sound relational data modelling fundamentals.

• Familiarity with APIs, asynchronous processing, queues, and distributed systems.

• Understanding of prompt engineering, structured outputs, and model inference.

• Solid fundamentals in testing, debugging, and system design.

• Understanding of multi-tenant systems and the importance of maintaining customer-level data isolation.

• Clear written communication skills and a product mindset focused on real-world impact.

Nice to Have

• Experience with agentic systems, workflows, or orchestration frameworks.

• Experience with browser automation tools such as Playwright.

• Familiarity with Temporal, Celery, Airflow, or other durable execution engines.

• Experience with PostgreSQL beyond basic CRUD operations.

• Experience working with AWS in production environments.

• Background in regulated domains such as identity verification, payroll, healthcare, fintech, or compliance.

• Experience with HR tech, marketplaces, or other high-volume operational products.

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

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

Why Join FirstWork?

• Build with AI: Work hands-on with LLMs, AI agents, and intelligent automation in real production environments.

• Solve meaningful problems: Build technology that automates complex workforce operations for global enterprises.

• Own what you build: Take features from concept to production and see their impact firsthand.

• Work at scale: Build systems processing millions of API requests and AI-powered document workflows.

• Grow with the company: Join at an exciting stage and contribute to shaping the product and engineering foundations as FirstWork scales.

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.