Senior Software Engineer, Backend

We’re on a mission to make sure everyone has access to the law.

Lawhive is an online platform for consumers and small businesses to get legal help for a fraction of the cost of a law firm. Our platform combines regulated human lawyers collaborating alongside the world’s first AI lawyer specifically built for consumer legal work.

Equal access to the law is one of the biggest and most pressing unsolved problems in society today. We’re passionate about leveling the playing field and believe access to the law should be a basic utility in society.

Our AI lawyer Lawrence is built on top of our own fine-tuned LLM who has passed the Solicitors Qualifying Exams (SQE).

We have backing from leading US and UK VC funds including Google Ventures, Balderton Capital and TQ Ventures (who have funded 82 unicorns between them!). We recently secured a $40m Series A funding round to facilitate international expansion and to grow our team. This represents one of the five largest Series A rounds in Europe for 2024!

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Python Engineer to join our AI team to bring our our latest AI-driven features and services into production. Deploying them at scale, improving infrastructure, and ensuring robustness in production. You’ll work closely with AI researchers, software engineers, and product teams to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and real-world applications.

Responsibilities

• Developing production-ready APIs and services that expose AI functionality to internal and external applications.
• Improving reliability & monitoring for AI-driven applications in production.
• Scaling AI systems to handle real-world legal use cases (e.g., legal document analysis, case predictions, automated legal advice).
• Collaborating with AI engineers to ensure smooth deployment of AI workflows and models into production.
• Working with event-driven architectures and async workflows to process large-scale AI workloads efficiently.
• Ensuring security & compliance in AI-driven legal services.

Our Engineering Culture

• Ship daily - We’re building and releasing features fast, going from idea to production in hours rather than weeks.
• Empathise with users - Lawyers and legal clients have unique perspectives, preferences and expectations. We build products which understand them deeply.
• Strive for excellence - We’re ambitious and moving fast. The whole business is pushing to be a category defining legal tech company.
• Constantly learning and experimenting - We’re at the cutting edge of using AI to directly improve people’s lives. We take a blue-sky but pragmatic approach to how we apply new technologies.

Our Tech Stack

• TypeScript (Full-stack)
• React + Next.js, Tailwind, Prisma, tRPC
• PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis
• Serverless, AWS, Google Cloud, Github Actions
• DBT, BigQuery
• Terraform
• Python

• Strong Python experience in building scalable backend systems.
• Familiarity with API design & distributed systems architecture.
• Experience working with event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka, Pub/Sub, AWS Step Functions, etc.).
• Comfortable optimising performance & scaling distributed AI workloads.
• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP etc).
• Understanding of best practices in observability, monitoring, and debugging.

Nice to Have

• Experience deploying machine learning models to production (ML Ops experience a plus).
• Experience with Vector Databases and AI Model Serving
• Prior Experience in Legal Tech - understanding of the legal industry and experience working with legal technology solutions.