Backend Engineer

Discernis; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Discernis, based in New York, is hiring a professional Python backend engineer to build and extend the services powering our AI-driven document platform. You will work with the engineering lead and AI/search engineers on ingestion, processing, and retrieval challenges, with room to grow as the platform scales.

You will implement core backend features, APIs, and pipelines for PDFs, Office files, and OCR workflows, improve performance, reliability, testing, and security boundaries, and collaborate

Qualifications

• Professional Python backend experience.
• Experience with Flask, or a similar framework, and relational databases.
• Familiarity with background processing systems such as Celery.
• Exposure to search systems like Elasticsearch or OpenSearch is a plus.
• A habit of improving the quality, performance, and maintainability of the systems you work on.
• Comfort operating in a fast moving, product focused environment.

Responsibilities

• Build and extend core backend services that power document ingestion, processing, and analysis.
• Build and maintain the APIs used by our frontend and internal AI services.
• Develop pipelines for PDFs, Office files, email containers, and OCR driven workflows.
• Improve performance across database access patterns and background task systems.
• Strengthen reliability through thoughtful testing, observability, and clean service boundaries.
• Contribute to authentication, authorization, and secure system design.
• Work with our search and AI engineers to support large scale indexing and retrieval.

Skills

Python backend

Flask

Relational DBs

Celery

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Quality focus

Fast-paced environment

Job description

Discernis builds AI driven document intelligence for high stakes legal work. Because our customers handle privileged and regulated matters that most cloud AI cannot touch, we run on premises and in customer controlled environments as well as in the cloud. That makes security, reliability, and reproducibility core product features, not afterthoughts. We work with AmLaw firms and enterprise legal teams where accuracy, explainability, and data control are non negotiable.

The Role

You will build and extend the services that power our document platform and serve AI driven features to users. You will work closely with our engineering lead and our search and AI engineers, with plenty of well scoped, high impact problems in ingestion, processing, and retrieval, and real room to grow your scope as the platform does.

What You Will Do

• Build and extend core backend services that power document ingestion, processing, and analysis
• Build and maintain the APIs used by our frontend and internal AI services
• Develop pipelines for PDFs, Office files, email containers, and OCR driven workflows
• Improve performance across database access patterns and background task systems
• Strengthen reliability through thoughtful testing, observability, and clean service boundaries
• Contribute to authentication, authorization, and secure system design
• Work with our search and AI engineers to support large scale indexing and retrieval

What You Bring

• Professional Python backend experience
• Experience with Flask, or a similar framework, and relational databases
• Familiarity with background processing systems such as Celery
• Exposure to search systems like Elasticsearch or OpenSearch is a plus
• A habit of improving the quality, performance, and maintainability of the systems you work on
• Comfort operating in a fast moving, product focused environment