Senior Backend Engineer (Manhattan)

Immigration runs on data scattered across a dozen government systems and nearly impossible to navigate alone. Lawfully turns it into clarity .

We bring that data into a clean, live case timeline that millions of immigrants — and the law firms serving them — depend on. With the recent launch of Lawfully Intelligence , we've opened that data layer up to the immigration attorneys who move the system every day, and they've embraced it fast.

Behind it is a real distributed system: ~25 Go services, a high-throughput Kafka pipeline, an EKS platform, and a legacy monolith we're actively dismantling. We're looking for the person to own its technical direction and reliability — and grow the team that runs it. This is a high-impact engineering role with meaningful equity, real ownership, and direct influence on how Lawfully scales.

What you'll do

• Set the architecture. Own how our backend fleet and data pipeline fit together, and where they go next.
• Run the platform. Our EKS infrastructure, deploy pipeline, Kafka, and databases are yours to make fast, safe, and boring.
• Kill the hard problems. Single points of failure, secrets baked into images, infra that drifts out of version control — we know our debt, and you'll lead the paydown.
• Land the migration. Strangle the legacy monolith into modern Go services without users ever noticing.
• Build the team. Mentor engineers, set the review bar, and run calm, sharp incident responses.

You're a strong fit if you

• Know backend distributed systems deeply and have led engineers before. We weigh demonstrated ability over tenure — if you have the chops, the year count matters less.
• Are strong in Go (or can get there fast) and think clearly about Kafka, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, and cloud platform like AWS or GCP in production.
• Have decomposed a legacy system in flight — without breaking the clients depending on it.
• Can hold the line between shipping features and paying down reliability debt, and make the call when they conflict.
• Lead by raising the people around you, not just the code.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Scala, Python and Airflow.
• Fluent with AI-assisted engineering workflows — you get real leverage from tools like Claude Code or Cursor, and know where they help and where they don’t.
• Conversational Korean — much of our team is Korean-speaking, so it's a plus for collaboration, though not a requirement.