Hiring Series: Software Engineer – Forward Deployed

Welcome to a MeritFirst Hiring Series Assessment. Each assessment in the Hiring Series is built to help you show what you do best. Not only are we assessing these for our own hiring needs but partner companies - including 8VC and Slow Ventures portfolio companies, OpenClaw, Eragon, and more -- receive a short list of top performers. No resume required. Double opt-in: we'll confirm with you once more before putting you in touch with a company. This assessment focuses on Forward Deployed Software Engineering. Great candidates will be able to translate ambiguous client needs into technical solutions, diagnose system failures under pressure, and communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders. We'll ask you to introduce yourself, then work through three scenarios: one where you decompose a client's vague request into concrete technical requirements and propose a scoped first deliverable, another where you diagnose a production pipeline outage and coordinate a fix under a hard deadline, and a third where you explain a technical blocker to two stakeholders with very different needs and get them aligned on a revised plan. LLM Usage: We believe that LLMs are an important tool for analytical work. In this context however, we want to understand how you think, write, and work through a problem on your own. For this reason, please avoid using LLMs for writing, data analysis, or generating insights. We expect that this assessment to take 70 minutes. But we'll give you plenty of extra time!