Senior Software Engineer, Backend - AI Labs

About Epiq and AI Labs

At Epiq, your contributions influence complex global legal proceedings. Join a community grounded in integrity, outstanding service, and collaboration on challenging projects. Epiq invests in your professional growth through enterprise-wide learning opportunities and values your work-life balance with externally recognized flexibility. Leveraging modern technology and AI, you will engage in impactful work visible at a large scale.

Epiq AI Labs serves as the innovation center driving the next-gen AI platform for corporate legal departments and law firms worldwide. Functioning like a startup within a global legal services provider, the team focuses on agentic AI systems, knowledge-based reasoning, and large-scale simulations. It is characterized by a rapid, experimental, product-focused approach combined with tight collaboration and deep technical expertise, supported by extensive global resources and data.

Role Overview

You will develop and manage backend services for AI-powered legal platforms, encompassing asynchronous workflows, data pipelines, secure access layers, and user authentication/authorization. These critical systems are owned end-to-end. As the platform expands, the components you manage will scale along with it. Reliability and scalability are fundamental requirements, ensuring systems support increased user base, data volume, and concurrency seamlessly through features like retries, idempotency, graceful degradation, and thorough instrumentation for problem diagnosis.

Development follows best practices with thoughtful system design decisions made collaboratively with senior engineers. The platform is in its foundational phase, so your work will have long-lasting impact.

Primary Responsibilities

• Develop, test, and maintain backend APIs and services powering the AI platform.
• Design and manage asynchronous processing via message queues with mechanisms for retries, dead-letter queues, and failure recovery.
• Contribute to data pipelines handling ingestion, parsing, storage, and indexing of large legal document volumes.
• Implement security features including authentication and authorization supporting OAuth2, OIDC, SAML, and role-based access control for multi-tenant scenarios.
• Design and optimize PostgreSQL database schemas and queries, and safely perform schema migrations under live traffic conditions.
• Integrate search and vector database technologies like Solr and Qdrant to support advanced query capabilities.
• Instrument services with monitoring tools capturing metrics, logs, and traces; actively participate in on-call rotations.
• Develop automated tests, engage in code reviews, and maintain continuous integration pipelines.
• Collaborate across teams including AI engineers, backend developers, product managers, and security experts to shape technical solutions.

Required Qualifications

• Minimum three years of professional experience building and operating production backend services, including handling live production issues.
• Proficiency in Python or comparable programming language, with ability to primarily utilize Python.
• Experience working with at least one major cloud environment (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud).
• Familiarity with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL, including skills in schema design, query performance tuning, and live migrations.
• Hands-on experience with asynchronous or event-driven systems such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, or equivalent message queuing systems.
• Expertise designing and implementing RESTful APIs consumed internally or by external teams.
• Foundation in developing automated tests and maintaining continuous integration workflows.
• Exposure to container technologies like Docker and basic understanding of Kubernetes orchestration.
• Knowledge of observability best practices, including monitoring, logging, and tracing.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI development tools effectively as part of software engineering workflows.
• Strong communication skills with capability to progress on complex or ambiguous problems under general guidance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale document or data processing pipelines.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
• Experience in multi-tenant SaaS platform architectures.
• Exposure to AI/ML system development or data-intensive applications.
• Background in legal technology or other regulated industries.
• Hands-on knowledge of authentication and authorization protocols OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML.

Technical Stack

• Python
• PostgreSQL
• RabbitMQ
• Solr
• Qdrant
• OAuth2, OIDC, SAML
• Microsoft Azure
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Terraform
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• OpenTelemetry

Compensation and Employment Details

The annual salary range for this position is CAD 200,000 to CAD 255,000, with eligibility for an annual discretionary bonus subject to background and skill alignment. Candidates must be authorized to work in Canada, providing proof of the right to work upon request.

Leadership Philosophy

Epiq embraces leadership principles to foster collaboration, engagement, performance, and operational excellence, including building trust, inspiring alignment, setting clear goals, utilizing data-driven improvements, and encouraging continuous process refinement.

Equal Opportunity Information

Epiq is committed to equal employment opportunities without discrimination based on protected characteristics, promoting affirmative action and accommodating applicants with disabilities during hiring.