Senior Backend Engineer (4–6 Week MVP Contract)

Company Description

Merge Group, LLC (operating as Faro Meridian) is a founderled socialintelligence venture focused on detecting online narrative harms, including bias and discrimination that impact real people and institutions. We work with civilrightsadjacent, governance, and policy partners to surface harmful patterns in public discourse in a way that is privacyrespectful and operationally useful.

For this MVP phase, Faro is a small, disciplined team that values clear scope, lean execution, and tight guardrails around data and AI use; engineers who join us work directly with the founder to build narrowly targeted tools that support accountability and digital rights.

Role Description

This is a parttime, timeboxed remote contract for a Senior Backend Engineer to deliver a narrowly scoped Minimum Viable Product (MVP) over 4–6 weeks (20 hours per week). The engineer will implement a small, pragmatic backend that ingests text data, applies a predefined taxonomy to detect online narrative harms and algorithmic bias, and exposes simple APIs or endpoints for basic analysis and reporting. Daytoday work is handson coding, testing, and deployment as a single independent contributor, collaborating directly with the founder on priorities and guardrails rather than a larger engineering team. The focus is disciplined execution within fixed scope, budget, and governance constraints; not ongoing product ownership or scope expansion.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in backend or fullstack web development, with at least one 4–8 week MVP or prototype delivered as a primary contributor.
• Strong experience with Python (preferred) or Node.js, REST APIs, and relational databases (PostgreSQL or similar), including basic schema design and data pipelines.
• Comfortable working as a single independent contributor: planning, implementing, testing, and deploying a small system with minimal supervision.
• Demonstrated ability to work within fixed timelines, budgets, and governance/privacy constraints, ideally on trust & safety, risk, or compliancesensitive projects.
• Clear, concise written and spoken English; able to communicate trade-offs and then execute under founder-defined scope and guardrails.
• Degree in Computer Science or related field is welcome but not required; proven delivery and references matter more for this role.