Software Engineer, Backend

About Epiq and Epiq AI Labs

Join Epiq to contribute to complex international legal outcomes as part of a values-driven team emphasizing integrity, committed service, and tackling substantial challenges. The company promotes continuous growth through organization-wide learning and mobility, honors individuality, and supports work-life balance through recognized flexible working arrangements. Utilizing advanced platforms and AI, you'll perform impactful work that resonates at global scale.

Epiq AI Labs serves as the innovative engineering sector designing next-generation AI platforms for corporate legal teams and law firms globally. Operating with a startup mentality within a global organization, the team focuses on agent-driven AI, knowledge-centric reasoning, and scalable enterprise simulations. They prioritize speed, experimentation, product passion, close collaboration with minimal bureaucracy, and deep technical expertise, supported by global resources and data access.

Role Overview

You will be responsible for creating and managing backend services for an AI-powered legal platform. This includes asynchronous processing, data pipelines, data access layers, and securing authentication and authorization processes. You will fully own substantial system components, ensuring scalability and reliability to handle growing multi-tenant demands and data concurrency without major redesigns. System resilience through retries, idempotency, and graceful degradation along with extensive instrumentation for monitoring are key expectations. Design decisions are carefully made and documented collaboratively.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, test, and maintain backend services and APIs integral to the AI platform.
• Manage message-queue asynchronous processing with robust failure handling, including retries and dead-letter queues.
• Participate in building data pipelines for ingestion, parsing, storage, and indexing of large document volumes.
• Implement authentication and authorization mechanisms conforming to standards like OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML, including multi-tenant role-based access controls.
• Design and optimize PostgreSQL database schemas and queries, performing schema migrations on live systems.
• Integrate search and vector storage solutions such as Solr and Qdrant.
• Instrument backend services with comprehensive metrics, logging, and tracing; monitor system health and contribute to on-call rotations.
• Write automated tests, engage in code reviews, and maintain continuous integration pipelines.
• Contribute to technical architecture and participate in design reviews collaboratively.
• Work closely with AI engineers, backend colleagues, product teams, and security professionals.

Required Background

• Minimum of three years' experience in production backend service development and maintenance, including incident response.
• Proficiency in Python or equivalent languages, with ability to primarily code in Python.
• Experience with major cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure.
• Knowledge in relational databases, schema design, query tuning, and live migrations; PostgreSQL preferred.
• Hands-on experience with asynchronous/event-driven frameworks, message queues like RabbitMQ or Kafka.
• Capability to design and implement RESTful APIs consumed internally or by external teams.
• Familiarity with automated testing frameworks and continuous integration workflows.
• Understanding of containerization technologies like Docker and exposure to Kubernetes orchestration.
• Knowledge in observability including metrics collection, logging, and distributed tracing.
• Demonstrable experience using AI tools in software development.
• Strong communication skills, both written and spoken, with aptitude for progressing ambiguous problems under some guidance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience handling large-scale data or document processing pipelines.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
• Background in building multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Exposure to AI/ML systems or data-heavy applications.
• Experience in regulated sectors like legal technology.
• Technical knowledge of OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML for secure access.

Technical Stack

• Python
• PostgreSQL
• RabbitMQ
• Solr
• Qdrant
• OAuth2 / OIDC / SAML
• Azure Cloud
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Terraform
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• OpenTelemetry

Compensation and Benefits

Your salary will be evaluated based on location market rates, your competencies according to the job description, interview performance, and pay equality with peers. Additional benefit details will be shared during the initial recruitment discussion.

Leadership Principles

The role encourages fostering relationships and partnerships through trust and collaboration; engaging and influencing through clear communication and organizational alignment; maximizing performance with data-driven decision-making and empowering teams; and driving operational excellence through efficient processes, documentation, and timely issue resolution.

Equal Opportunity Policy

Epiq is committed to equal employment opportunities without discrimination on any legally protected bases such as race, religion, gender identity, disability, veteran status, and others. The company also offers reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and considers qualified individuals with criminal records where permitted by law.