Principal Backend Engineer

Big Hand offers technology solutions for busy legal professionals that provide data and insights to increase value and profits. Through our expert knowledge and innovative technology, we enable our customers to achieve enhanced efficiency, better decision-making and harness their competitive edge.

We build with tomorrow in mind, transforming ideas into action and empowering our customers to succeed in a world of constant change. We make big happen for our customers.

We are a business driven by our values and have these at the centre of everything we do. Our Big Handers are dedicated to building a culture where We Win Together, We Love to Learn, We Do the Right Thing, We Own It and We Find the Fun.

Big Hand builds software that legal organisations rely on every day. Following our acquisition of Ayora AI, we are looking for a Principal Backend Engineer to own the data engineering and infrastructure behind our Agentic AI systems. This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role at the heart of a small team, taking ownership of the Python and AWS platform that powers them.

We process structured and unstructured data from some of the biggest law firms in the world, using traditional analytical techniques and Agentic AI. Working with our team of data scientists, full-stack AI engineers and legal engineers, you will help us scale these processes to even more customers, and work at the heart of the feature expansion and optimisation of our stack.

You will also mentor and support a mid-level backend engineer, helping them grow into a senior role.

Ayora's Product can be found here: https://(Use the "Apply for this Job" box below)./

Big Hand's Products can be found here:

• Own and evolve the Python data pipelines, backend services and AWS infrastructure behind our Agentic AI products.

• Build powerful integrations between Ayora's platform and Big Hand's wider product suite to expose our Agentic AI systems to more data and help improve the agentic harness.

• Mentor, support and potentially line manage a mid-level backend engineer, helping them progress to senior.

• Contribute to technical discussion and help shape requirements rather than simply consuming them.

• Develop well-constructed solutions using the best tools available, avoiding fragile shortcuts taken for short-term speed.

• Apply modern software development lifecycle practices, including agentic development, code review, testing and continuous delivery

• Strong commercial Python experience. This is a must.

• Solid experience with AWS services and infrastructure.

• Strong working knowledge of databases and SQL.

• Data engineering experience: building and running data pipelines and connecting data into products, ideally in a B2B SaaS environment.

• Experience reconsidering and reshaping an existing architecture as a product or business scales.

• A solid understanding of modern software development lifecycle practices, including agentic developer experience.

• The ability to navigate problems independently, contribute to discussion and help shape technical requirements.

• A product mindset and experience working directly with customers.

• Full-stack skills, including Type Script and React.

• Experience with Go.

• Interest or practical experience in agentic AI and LLMs.

• Exposure to the rest of our Dev Ops stack:
  Terraform and Git Lab CI.

• Experience mentoring or managing engineers.

• An analytical background, for example a STEM degree in a technical subject.

• Experience in the legal industry or another regulated environment such as health or financial services.

• An appetite for learning and for introducing new technology and practices that accelerate the team.

Python/Go and AWS services across data and backend, with SQL and DynamoDB databases underneath. Type Script and React on the front end, and Terraform and Git Lab CI across our Dev Ops tooling.

• 25 days holiday (exc. bank holidays) + 3 Big Hand days off between Christmas & New Year

• Various wellbeing benefits including private medical, vision, online wellbeing programs & webinars, access to online therapy and Employee Resource Groups (ERG)

• Company-wide Wellness day, for our teams all across the globe to switch off and spend the day doing something to nourish their mental health

• Opportunities to give back with company volunteer events and individual volunteer days

• Career growth opportunities and study leave allowance

• Family benefits including enhanced parental leave, secondary caregiver leave and fertility…