Backend Engineer for Production-Scale AI Agents

Firstwork; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

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. You’ll own features end to end, ship every week, and work with real users at enterprise scale.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Python

Django

API design

SQL databases

Distributed systems

Testing & debugging

Multi-tenant apps

Product mindset

Tools

Django REST Framework

Job 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 Backend Engineer to design and build the AI-powered product features that carry a worker from application to their first day on the job. You’ll own features end to end, ship every week, and work with real users at enterprise scale.