Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Altera AI is building an AI litigation associate that produces verified, court-ready legal work for law firms. The Staff Backend & Platform Engineer will own the backend platform and infrastructure foundations for scaling reliably across thousands of firms, including durable execution, multi-tenancy, service architecture, cloud delivery, observability, incident response, jurisdiction abstractions, and compliance groundwork.
Responsibilities
- Durable execution. Legal workflows run for hours across multiple attorney checkpoints. You'll take our current workflow execution model and make durability a first-class guarantee: surviving deploys, restarts, and partial failures, with idempotent recovery from every checkpoint
- Multi-tenancy as a hard boundary. Database-enforced isolation between firms, with a test matrix that proves cross-tenant denial rather than assuming it
- Service architecture and scale. Splitting document ingestion from API serving, per-tenant fairness so one firm's bulk upload can't starve another, connection pooling, regional deployment, load shedding, and per-tenant spend controls against model providers
- Cloud and delivery. Infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, deploys, secrets, observability, on-call, and incident response. You'll take this over from our CTO, who currently holds all of it and is the bottleneck because of it
- The jurisdiction abstraction. Build the architecture that models rules of court, local rules, judge standing orders, caption formats, and other jurisdiction-specific requirements as structured data rather than bespoke application code. The goal: adding a state should be a content problem, not an engineering project. This is one of the highest-leverage design decisions we'll make this year
- Enterprise and compliance groundwork. SSO/SCIM, audit logging, retention, and the engineering half of SOC 2
Skills
- Experience: 7+ years, or equivalent demonstrated depth
- Location: Remote (US) · Core working hours aligned with 9am–5pm Central
- • 7+ years building production Python backends, or equivalent demonstrated depth , with real expertise in async Python — you know what blocks an event loop and how to find out when something does
- • Serious Postgres. Schema design, query planning, migrations against live data, and ideally row-level security or another database-enforced tenancy model
- • Real infrastructure ownership. A major cloud, containers, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and production on-call. You've been paged and you've fixed the thing
- • Distributed job or workflow systems — Temporal, DBOS, Celery, arq, Inngest, or your own — including what happens when they half-fail
- • Fluent with AI coding tools, and accountable for what they produce. We use them heavily and expect you to. The skill that matters isn't prompting — it's reviewing code you didn't write as rigorously as code you did, catching the plausible-but-wrong change before it merges, and knowing which problems to hand to a model and which to think through yourself
- • Testing and observability as instinct , not a phase. You reach for a trace before a print statement
- • Comfort with ambiguity. Our specs are good, but the domain is genuinely complicated and nobody will hand you a fully-formed ticket
- Core stack is Python and Postgres, on managed cloud infrastructure . Everything above that — frameworks, queues, vendors — we expect to change as we scale, and we'd rather hire someone who has opinions about the change than someone who matches today's list
- You don't need a legal background. You do need to find the domain interesting enough to learn it properly
- Nice to have: legal tech or another regulated, high-consequence domain such as health, fintech, or compliance; document generation; search and retrieval; privacy engineering including PII detection, redaction, and egress control; running GPU inference
Benefits
- Meaningful early equity
- Health, dental and vision
- PTO
- 401(k)
- Fully remote with core working hours aligned with 9am–5pm Central
- We protect focused work and keep meetings scarce
Company Overview