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 Backend Engineer to design and build the 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: document, browsing, voice, and conversational; collaborating closely with product managers, designers, and the engineers building our AI infrastructure. This is a true product engineering role: you'll own features end to end, ship every week, and see your work meet real enterprise volume the day it merges. Production code, real users, real scale.
## **The scale we run at**
- ~50,000 workers a week move through our hiring and onboarding flows.
- 2.5 million API requests a day across the platform.
- Millions of document pages a year processed by AI agents, across 40+ countries and a dozen-plus languages.
- Global staffing, logistics, healthcare, marketplace, and employment platforms across the US, UK, EU, LATAM, and India.
- Billing on work performed, per document validated and per agent action executed, which makes product design, cost per unit, and gross margin one conversation.
## **What you'll do**
- Build and ship AI-powered product features using LLMs, document agents, and agentic workflows.
- Develop backend services and APIs that support model inference, orchestration, and tool execution.
- Implement document extraction and validation pipelines that read real-world documents and auto-fill product data.
- Build AI browsing agents that drive government and third-party portals through the browser, where the only interface is the UI.
- Ship conversational and voice agents that screen and follow up with candidates over phone, SMS, and WhatsApp.
- Write and debug durable async workflows in Temporal for automations, AI jobs, and bulk actions.
- Design and evolve the REST APIs and webhooks that customer ATS, HR, and payroll integrations run on.
- Handle the production realities of AI: prompt design, structured output, retries, evaluation, and cost control.
- Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code and take part in code and design review.
- Improve system performance, reliability, and scalability using production data.
## **What we need**
- 3–5 years of professional backend engineering experience.
- Strong Python, with meaningful time in Django and Django REST Framework or a close equivalent.
- Hands-on experience integrating LLMs or ML-powered features into a live product.
- Real SQL fluency and sound relational data modelling instincts.
- Familiarity with APIs, async processing, queues, and distributed systems.
- Understanding of prompting, structured output, and model inference.
- Solid fundamentals in testing, debugging, and system design.
- Care for correctness in multi-tenant systems, where every query stays scoped to a single customer.
- Clear written communication and a product mindset focused on real-world impact.
## **Nice to have**
- Experience with agentic systems, workflows, or orchestration frameworks.
- Browser automation at scale with Playwright or similar.
- Temporal, Celery, Airflow, or another durable execution engine.
- PostgreSQL beyond CRUD, and AWS in production.
- Regulated domains such as identity, payroll, healthcare, fintech, or compliance.
- HR tech, marketplaces, or other high-volume operational products.
- Experience in an AI-first, fast-moving product environment.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude.
## **About FirstWork**
FirstWork 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.
We 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.
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.
Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
