Software Engineer, Systems Engineer

Position: Staff Software Engineer
# Staff Software Engineer## Company Description Expert Institute is the #1 technology platform connecting litigation attorneys with expert witnesses. We operate in a multi-billion-dollar market with massive untapped potential (~2% market share today). With thousands of law firm clients nationwide and 1M+ experts on our platform, we're scaling quickly—and looking for elite engineering talent to help architect the next phase of growth.##

Job Description We're looking for a
** Staff Software Engineer
** to serve as a technical leader and architect for the products powering our two-sided marketplace. You'll set the technical direction for critical systems, drive architectural decisions that shape our platform for years to come, and mentor engineers across the organization. From designing AI-powered document processing pipelines to architecting the data infrastructure behind our case-matching intelligence, you'll operate at the intersection of deep technical craft and high-leverage business impact.

This role is for a seasoned engineer who has already done the "senior engineer" job well and is ready to expand their scope—influencing systems, teams, and the technical strategy of the company. You'll partner directly with engineering leadership, Product, and Design to translate ambitious business goals into resilient, scalable technical realities.

What You'll Do
* ** Architect and lead
** the design of complex, distributed systems that power our marketplace at scale, including our AI/ML infrastructure, search and matching services, and data platform
* ** Drive technical strategy
** across multiple teams and services—setting standards for reliability, performance, security, and developer experience
* ** Own our AWS cloud infrastructure
** end-to-end: VPC design, compute (ECS/EKS/Lambda), data stores (RDS, Dynamo

DB, S3), networking, IAM, observability, and cost optimization
* ** Design and evolve our data platform**—including data modeling, ETL/ELT pipelines, warehousing (e.g., Redshift/Snowflake), streaming architectures, and the data foundations that power analytics and ML
* ** Lead the technical design
** of AI-powered features, including LLM-backed document processing, embeddings/vector search for expert matching, RAG pipelines, and evaluation frameworks
* ** Establish engineering excellence:
** define coding standards, CI/CD practices, testing strategies, incident response processes, and operational maturity across the org
* ** Mentor engineers
** at all levels—through code review, design review, pairing, and career coaching—raising the bar for the entire team
* ** Partner with leadership
** on technical roadmap, hiring, org design, and build-vs-buy decisions
* ** Own critical production systems
** including on-call rotation leadership, SLO definition, and driving postmortems that translate incidents into lasting improvements
* ** Identify and resolve
** systemic performance, scalability, and reliability bottlenecks before they become customer-facing problems## Qualifications We're looking for candidates who are:
* Seasoned technical leaders who thrive in ambiguity and can turn vague goals into concrete architectures
* Deeply curious about AI/ML and actively shipping production systems using modern techniques (LLMs, embeddings, vector DBs, agentic workflows)
* Strong generalists with depth in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and data engineering
* Expert-level in Node.js, Type Script, and Postgre

SQL, with working fluency across additional languages and data stores
* Force multipliers who make the engineers around them better
* ** 8+ years
** of professional engineering experience, with at least 2+ years operating at a Staff or equivalent level of scope and influence
* ** Deep AWS expertise**—you've designed, built, and operated production workloads across compute, storage, networking, and managed services; you understand the trade-offs between ECS vs. EKS vs. Lambda, when to reach for Aurora vs. Dynamo

DB, and how to keep a cloud bill sane as you scale
* ** Infrastructure-as-code fluency
** with Terraform, CDK, or Pulumi, and a strong grasp of CI/CD, containerization (Docker), and modern deployment practices
* ** Data…