We are looking for a Software Development Engineer to join our team, building the next generation of applications for the legal industry. After several years of high growth, Zipliens has become a leader in lien resolution, a process required in most personal injury settlements. The software we build supports that work, giving it clear, real-world impact beyond the technical challenges.
We're scaling engineering significantly this year. You'd be joining a codebase with established patterns and helping extend those patterns as the team grows several times over. You'll have context available rather than a blank slate, and senior engineers on hand when a decision warrants one.
Over the coming year, we're building large-scale data processing, smarter automation of staff workflows, ML/LLM systems that extract structure from medical records and lien correspondence, and customer-facing experiences that make the lien process more transparent. In this role, you'll work across our React and Python/Django stack: building features, resolving issues, and contributing to system improvements alongside product, operations, and your fellow engineers.
We're hiring for this role at two levels. The difference is scope and independence - how large a piece of work you carry, and how much of it you shepherd through review and deployment on your own - not the kind of work you'd do.
We also build with AI as a first-class part of the workflow: agentic coding tools, plus internal skills and harnesses we've written ourselves. Not autocomplete. You'd be expected to use them well and to improve them.
RequirementsResponsibilities:- Build and maintain features across our Python/Django backend and React frontend, writing code that is clean, readable, and consistent with our team's conventions.
- Develop and ship features, shepherding your own work from first commit through review, QA, and deployment. How much support you get there depends on where you land; the expectation of ownership doesn't change.
- Operate what you build: troubleshoot production issues, debug your services in AWS, and follow security practices appropriate to sensitive legal and medical data.
- Build and maintain backend services and data processing workflows over large datasets, automating what's currently manual.
- Work with product and operations to turn acceptance criteria into features our staff and clients actually use - asking questions where they're unclear, and pushing back where they're wrong.
- Work with internal stakeholders to translate business needs into technical solutions.
- Contribute to architecture and scalability improvements under the guidance of senior engineers.
- Participate in code reviews, both giving thoughtful feedback and acting on it.
Qualifications:- 2+ years of software development experience building and maintaining systems in production.
- Working experience with Python/Django (preferred) or a comparable framework (Node.js, Rails, Laravel).
- Working proficiency in React.
- Working SQL and PostgreSQL, including writing and reasoning about queries against large tables.
- Hands-on AWS experience - EKS/EC2, RDS, S3, and queueing (SQS or similar). You should understand the infrastructure your services run on, not treat it as someone else's problem.
- Proficiency in at least one technical area and a functional understanding of the applications your team owns.
- Strong problem-solving skills and a willingness to take on unfamiliar work.
- Clear written and verbal communication; you'll be explaining technical constraints to non-technical stakeholders.
Nice to Have:- Experience using or experimenting with agentic coding tools, and interest in building tooling around them.
- Hands-on experience with LLM or ML features, whether in production or through prototypes and experimentation: prompting, evaluation, and understanding how they fail.
- Experience with document processing or extraction from unstructured data.
- Experience integrating third-party or partner APIs, especially where the data is inconsistent, and the counterparty's documentation isn't solid.
- Experience handling sensitive data such as PHI, or working under HIPAA-style requirements.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes. We have an SRE who owns the cluster; you won't be running it, but you'll be deploying to it and debugging your services in it.
BenefitsBenefits- Private Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
- Company HSA contributions for HDHP participants
- Flexible Spending Accounts (Health & Dependent Care)
- Company-Paid Short-Term Disability Coverage
- Voluntary Long-Term Disability, Life, AD&D, and Supplemental Coverage Options
- 401(k) Plan with Company Match
- Paid Time Off (Vacation, Sick Time & 10 paid Holidays)
- Parental Leave
Pay Disclosure: This role is posted at two levels. The total base salary range across both roles is $79,000 - $130,500 annually, with an opportunity to earn a discretionary quarterly bonus. Level and final compensation will be determined based on skills and experience.
Work Authorization: Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for employer-sponsored visa support now or in the future.
