Senior/Staff Backend Engineer

We're looking for a senior or staff-level backend engineer to own and evolve the core systems that power Lighthouse.

Our backend is Python and TypeScript, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, and serverless compute, with LLMs woven throughout.

This role is focused on making our backend faster, more reliable, and ready to scale. The problems ahead of us:

• Designing and building agentic systems: autonomous, multi-step workflows that draft legal documents, review cases, and orchestrate complex processes with minimal human input.

• Improving backend security: tightening auth, moving toward proper environment isolation, hardening our database access patterns.

• Scaling our API layer. The customer-facing GraphQL API has grown organically and needs better structure, performance, and maintainability.

• Building robust data pipelines and integrations across Slack, Linear, HubSpot, Front, and other external services.

• Strengthening our document ingestion and generation pipelines, the systems that turn messy inputs into filing-ready legal output.

• You have 5+ years building and operating production backend systems: APIs, databases, async job processing, event-driven architectures.

• You're strong in Python/Typescript and have experience building scalable, complex backend systems. Experience with PostgreSQL, async Python, and event-driven architectures is a plus.

• You've built (or want to build) agentic systems and LLM-powered features. We're automating complex legal workflows with AI and need people who want to push that forward.

• You think carefully about system design: service boundaries, data modeling, failure modes, observability.

• You have high agency, especially for independent research and problem-solving.

• You've dealt with the messy realities of scaling systems: migrations, dual-writes, feature flags, legacy code removal.

• Lighthouse is an engineering-led company. We get to pick/veto what we build.

• We spend a considerable chunk of time with users (the legal operations team, or customers) to find and pick what to build. Some projects our team has worked on include:

  • A real-time, collaborative text editor using CRDTs

  • An LLM agent framework with tools for case automation

  • A custom PDF compilation pipeline on serverless infrastructure

  • Autonomous letter-drafting agents powered by LLMs

• We ship multiple times a day, with a preference for testing ideas out quickly and polishing over time.

• We sponsor visas, obviously.

• Competitive base and equity, scales with experience.

• Competitive medical, dental, and vision benefits.

• 401k with a 3% company match.

• Equipment/office stipend.

• Annual team off-site in cool places.

• In person in San Francisco or New York.

Lighthouse is an equal opportunity workplace; we welcome people from all backgrounds, communities, and experiences. To apply, email your resume and something you've built to [email protected]. If selected, we'll schedule a call to get to know you better and do a deep technical dive into the work you've chosen to highlight.