Sr Software Engineer II

Senior Software Engineer II – NLP / Backend Systems

About the Team

We launched Lex Machina in 2011 for patent litigators and are now expanding Legal Analytics to all areas of the law with the help of Lexis Nexis, our parent company. Since being acquired in 2015, we have become one of the fastest growing businesses in Lexis Nexis. We have retained our start‑up like culture and pace, but are now backed with the stability of a big company.

The Lex Machina product provides Legal Analytics to companies and law firms, enabling them to craft successful litigation strategies, win cases, and close business. We are the pioneers of Legal Analytics and our award‑winning product is used by global corporations such as Google, eBay, Yahoo!, IBM, and Nike, as well as most of the AmLaw 100 law firms like Wilson Sonsini, Fish & Richardson, Greenberg Traurig, and Fenwick & West.

As a Senior Software Engineer II with strong backend and data engineering expertise, you will help evolve our Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data‑driven systems that power Lex Machina’s legal analytics products. You’ll work on maintaining, scaling, and improving the systems that extract, process, and deliver high‑quality legal data used by our customers to make informed decisions.

As part of the NLP / Algorithms team, you’ll collaborate with other engineers, product managers, data scientists, and domain experts to design reliable and performant backend solutions. You’ll also contribute to advancing our infrastructure and help bring new ideas in AI, data engineering, and automation into production.

• Design, implement, and optimize backend components of our NLP and data processing pipelines.
• Work across the full stack of data processing: from extraction to storage and delivery with an emphasis on maintainability, scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Collaborate with other teams to deliver features and infrastructure that improve product quality and developer productivity.
• Contribute to debugging, performance profiling, and tuning of large‑scale systems.
• Support migration and deployment to cloud‑based architectures and improve automation around build, deploy, and artifact management.
• Participate in code reviews, technical discussions, and mentorship of peers.

• 5+ years of experience developing, debugging, and maintaining backend applications or services.
• Strong experience with Python for backend or data engineering applications.
• Solid experience with Unix/Linux systems, shell scripting, and cloud‑based environments (AWS, GCP, or similar).
• Proficiency in SQL and database design, performance tuning, and query optimization.
• Familiarity with modern software engineering practices: version control (git), CI/CD, testing, and code review culture.
• Excellent analytical and debugging skills, with the ability to dive deep into complex systems.
• Strong communication skills and an ability to work collaboratively in a cross‑functional environment.
• Java experience or ability to read and extend existing Java‑based systems.
• Background in Natural Language Processing (NLP), information extraction, or text analytics.
• Data engineering experience with structured and unstructured datasets.
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch/Open Search, Ansible, or Kubernetes.

• Health Benefits:
  
  Comprehensive, multi‑carrier program for medical, dental and vision benefits.
• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with match and an Employee Share Purchase Plan.
• Wellbeing:
  Wellness platform with incentives, Headspace app subscription, Employee Assistance and Time‑off Programs.
• Short‑and‑Long Term Disability, Life and Accidental Death Insurance, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity.
• Family Benefits, including bonding and family care leaves, adoption and surrogacy benefits.
• Health Savings, Health Care, Dependent Care and Commuter Spending Accounts.
• Up to two days of paid leave each to participate in Employee Resource Groups and to volunteer with your charity of choice.

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organization. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your…