Engineering
Senior Software Engineer
RemoteFull-time
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build the infrastructure layer that powers Irys. You will work across retrieval pipelines, document processing, and the API surface that law firms and their developers build on. This is a high-ownership role on a small team where the decisions you make will be foundational.
Responsibilities
- Design and build the core retrieval and reasoning pipeline, including RAG architecture tailored to legal citation structures
- Develop and maintain the document ingestion and processing layer that handles contracts, filings, discovery sets, and correspondence at scale
- Architect the matter-level data model that persists context across the full lifecycle of a legal engagement
- Own the API surface that exposes Irys capabilities to external integrations, including matter management and billing systems
- Build and maintain the audit logging infrastructure that provides full provenance for every AI-generated output
- Collaborate closely with the founding team to define system architecture, review tradeoffs, and make decisions that will shape the product for years
- Establish and maintain engineering standards for reliability, observability, and performance in a production legal AI environment
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a senior or lead role
- Deep experience with TypeScript or Python and comfort shipping production services in either
- Hands-on experience with large language model APIs and retrieval-augmented generation systems
- Strong understanding of vector databases, semantic search, and the tradeoffs between retrieval approaches
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale, including background job queues and async processing pipelines
- Track record of making and documenting architectural decisions that you can defend under review
Nice to Have
- Experience in legal technology, legal data providers, or regulated industries with strict data handling requirements
- Familiarity with legal citation systems, court document formats, and the structure of legal authority hierarchies
- Experience fine-tuning or evaluating domain-specific language models
- Prior work in a seed or Series A startup where you helped define engineering culture from the ground up