Senior Backend Engineer - AI, APIs & Scalable Systems

Zipliens; Franklin (VA); On-site; USD 136,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Care Plan

Company 401(k) Match

Paid Time Off

Parental Leave

HSA contributions

FSAs

Short-Term Disability

Long-Term Disability

Life Insurance

AD&D

Voluntary Coverage Options

Job summary

Zipliens is a leading lien resolution company building core systems and data-heavy infrastructure at scale. We are seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join our team and shape the next generation of applications for the legal industry.

You will own third-party integrations, build ML/LLM-enabled data processing, decompose monoliths, and mentor engineers while delivering secure, production-grade backend services for large datasets.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software development experience building and maintaining backend systems in production.
• Significant experience with Python/Django or a comparable framework (Node.js, Rails, Laravel).
• Experience designing and building APIs that other teams or external parties consume.
• Experience integrating third-party or partner APIs, especially where the data is inconsistent, and the counterparty’s documentation isn’t solid.
• Hands-on AWS experience - EKS/EC2, RDS, S3, and queueing (SQS or similar).
• Strong SQL and PostgreSQL, including query optimization and schema design against large tables.
• Hands-on experience with LLM or ML features, whether in production or through prototypes and experimentation: prompting, evaluation, and understanding how they fail.
• Experience using or experimenting with agentic coding tools, and interest in building tooling around them.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising standards on a growing team.
• Excellent written and verbal communication - you’ll be explaining technical constraints to non-technical stakeholders and to external partners.

Responsibilities

• Own third-party integrations end to end, and help build the platform that makes new ones fast to stand up.
• You’ll work directly with counterparties’ technical teams to define contracts, handle their data formats, and build the abstractions that keep one-off integrations from becoming permanent maintenance debt.
• Build and operate ML/LLM systems that extract structure from medical records, lien correspondence, and other unstructured documents - including the evaluation and monitoring that tells you whether they’re actually working.
• Refactor and decompose monolithic services into systems that scale independently - and operate them once they’re live.
• Mentor mid-level engineers and set the bar in code review.
• We’re adding engineers quickly this year; the seniors we hire now establish what good looks like for everyone who follows.
• Build and maintain backend services and data processing workflows over large datasets, automating what’s currently manual.
• Operate what you build: troubleshoot production issues and implement security practices appropriate to sensitive legal and medical data.
• Work directly with internal stakeholders to translate business needs into technical solutions.

Skills

Python/Django

APIs

AWS

PostgreSQL

LLM/ML

Mentoring

Agentic tools

Communication

6+ years experience

APIs integration

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Zipliens is a leading lien resolution company building core systems and data-heavy infrastructure at scale. We are seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join our team and shape the next generation of applications for the legal industry.

You will own third-party integrations, build ML/LLM-enabled data processing, decompose monoliths, and mentor engineers while delivering secure, production-grade backend services for large datasets.