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. Lawfully