Hiring Series: Software Engineer – Full Stack

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 Full Stack Software Engineering. Great candidates will be able to write clean, correct code, reason about system architecture and tradeoffs, and diagnose production issues methodically. We'll ask you to introduce yourself, then work through three problems: a coding task where you implement backend logic and a frontend formatting layer that work together, a system design question where you evaluate an architecture migration proposal and recommend a better approach, and a debugging scenario where you diagnose intermittent order failures using logs and system data. 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 80 minutes. But we'll give you plenty of extra time!