Lead Back End Engineer

About DraftWise

DraftWise is industry-disrupting software for law firms. Our core product is an IDE for lawyers, built on a foundation of data management and analytics. The legal world is ripe for technology, and we intend to bring stepchange improvements to legal workflows.

Our founding team composes of ex-Google, ex-Palantir engineers and seasoned lawyers from top law firms. Our small team of 9 today is focused primarily on engineering and design. We're all currently working remotely but plan to open offices in the US and Europe as we are eagerly but consciously adding new members to our team from all over the world. We value quality over quantity, support each other through each major milestone and are respectful toward each other with a healthy dose of open discussion.

We’re very early stage and backed Y-Combinator, well known VC funds, and influential people in the legal space, technology and business.

Our company is growing extremely fast. We already have some of the biggest law firms in US, UK, EU on multi-year contracts. We have more demand than we can handle, and we are looking for talented engineers who care about producing great products they can be proud of, self-growth and our company mission and values.

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced, backend software engineer to join our core team. As an early team member, you will have a broad ownership and impact on the technology, the product, and our culture. You’ll work alongside and learn from a first-rate engineering team on big data, distributed systems (scalability and concurrency), enterprise search, and cloud infrastructure.

We have challenges at all levels of the stack, from the nuts and bolts of Docker and our in-house, declarative, multi-cloud management stack to a microservices oriented architecture and terabyte scale data pipeline all the way up to building beautiful web technology and training NLP models. We have a heavy JVM footprint, and are fans of gradle, docker, AWS, IaC, metrics-based-health, and keras.

We’d love you to take ownership of features, write performant, readable code, and make architectural decisions.

We have plenty of challenges at all levels of the stack, from the nuts and bolts of Docker and VM infrastructure and NLP all the way up to building beautiful web technology. We would love to have you to take ownership of features, make architectural and product decisions as well as writing code.

What we value

• Strong communication skills in an open environment.
• Skills to work independently and make decisions with minimal supervision.
• Interest in working in a dynamic environment with dynamic objectives.
• Individual autonomy and ownership, building quality products.
• Being open to giving and receiving feedback.

About You

We're looking for engineers who have:

• A passion for shipping high-quality product that delights users
• Interest in the data products space, and a love of building tools that empower lawyers to do more
• Interest and curiosity about the bigger picture of building a company, including go-to-market, customer development, people, and marketing
• Interest in helping us build an engineering organization
• Interest in ownership and autonomy
• 5+ years as a professional software engineer
• Time Zones: GMT-05:00 to GMT+03:00, but flexible

It's also great if you have:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Worked with elements in our tech stack:
  • Product: Java 17, JOOQ, DropWizard, Dagger
  • Data: Postgres, Elasticsearch, Tensoflow/Keras
  • DevOps: AWS Fargate, CDK, CloudWatch, On-Premise
• Experience in building, deploying, maintaining deployment infrastructure
• Experience building data-intensive applications, such as NLP, search and indexing, and data processing
• Interest in learning NLP
• Interest in being involved in engineering design decisions

What we offer

• All-remote work style, work anywhere. Ideally within UTC+4 to UTC-7
• Equity plan
• Competitive salary
• Private medical care
• New laptop and a work-from-home stipend for necessary accessories
• Generous PTO / sick leave
• Opportunity to lead our company as we disrupt the legal world

1. Intro chat to tell you about what we are building and find more about your interests. W are looking for ownership, autonomy, and intent but we also dig deeper into communication. This should take about 30 minutes.

2. Technical chat for us to deep dive into your past work and interests. the conversation will cover some light technical discussion about your past projects. Mostly, we want to know that you can code and ship fairly involved systems, and speak to them with clarity on the details. This tends to be a good indication that an engineer had strong ownership and showed autonomy in making product or technical decisions. This should take about 45 minutes.

3. Take home project (~3-4 hours). We simplified something we already built and will provide skeleton code for you to work on. The idea is to see your technical skills, as well as for you to find out if you like what we are working on.

Optionally, we would love for you to meet the rest of the team if you like to before you make a decision.

The typical interview process takes 2 weeks from start to finish.