Staff Backend & Platform Engineer

Altera AI, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental and vision insurance

PTO

401(k)

Job summary

Altera AI, Inc. is hiring a senior backend engineer to design and own the scalable platform that powers our AI litigation assistant.

You will own durable execution, multi-tenancy, and a robust deployment architecture to support thousands of firms while maintaining reliability, security, and performance. The role emphasizes building with Python backends, PostgreSQL, and distributed job systems, with strong ownership of infra and CI/CD.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production Python backends with async Python expertise.
• Serious PostgreSQL experience including schema design and migrations.
• Strong ownership of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and production on-call.
• Experience with distributed job or workflow systems like Temporal, Celery, arq.

Responsibilities

• Own the durable execution model across long-running legal workflows.
• Enforce multi-tenant isolation and scale through service boundaries.
• Architect and implement scalable back-end platform and deployment infra.
• Lead reliability, security, observability, and incident response initiatives.

Skills

Async Python

PostgreSQL

Python backends

Infrastructure ownership

Distributed job systems

Tools

Temporal

DBOS

Celery

arq

Job description

Location: Remote (US) · Core working hours aligned with 9am-5pm Central

Type: Full-time

Compensation: $200,000-250,000 + meaningful early equity

Benefits: Health, dental and vision; PTO; 401(k)

Experience: 7+ years, or equivalent demonstrated depth

About Altera

Most engineers want to join a rocket ship. We want engineers who can build one.

Altera is building an AI litigation associate-not another chatbot or copilot bolted onto a document editor. We're building a system that takes a real case file, works through it the way a great litigation associate would, and produces work that can actually be filed in court: the right arguments, the right record, the right local rules, and every factual assertion and citation verified before an attorney puts their name on it.

We're already live, with real lawyers using Altera to produce real court filings. Now we're scaling from two jurisdictions toward national coverage of the civil litigation market. That means taking a system that works today and building the backend, infrastructure, and reliability layer that can support thousands of firms without losing the speed or correctness that got us here.

We're competing with companies that have more engineers, more capital, and a head start. Our advantage has to be architectural leverage: a small team building systems that scale far beyond the size of the team itself. If that sounds like the kind of engineering challenge you want your fingerprints on, keep reading.

The Role

Can you build the platform today that we won't have to rebuild when Altera is 100x larger?

You'd be our fourth engineer, with unusually broad ownership of the backend platform and the infrastructure it runs on. At our size, those aren't separate jobs. If a workflow dies halfway through a filing, a tenant boundary fails, or one customer's workload degrades everyone else's, there isn't another platform team to hand it to. You'll own the foundation that lets us scale without sacrificing reliability, security, or speed.

The next year is fundamentally a scaling problem in a domain where correctness has consequences. Legal workflows can run for hours across multiple attorney checkpoints. A dropped background job can jeopardize a filing. A tenancy failure can expose privileged client information. An architecture that works for one firm can become dangerous at one hundred. Reliability, durability, isolation, and observability aren't infrastructure niceties here—they're part of the product.

You'll build those foundations while they're still yours to shape: durable execution, multi-tenancy, service boundaries, deployment architecture, observability, incident response, and the abstraction that lets us add jurisdictions without turning each new state into another engineering project. You'll establish these foundations yourself early on and help us decide where dedicated infrastructure, security, and platform ownership should emerge as the team grows.

This is the kind of role where a handful of decisions made in the next twelve months could still be visible in the architecture years from now.

If we build the company we intend to build, you'll be able to point at the platform underneath it and say: I designed that.

What you'll own

• Durable execution. Legal workflows run for hours across multiple attorney checkpoints. You'll take our current workflow execution model and make durability a first-class guarantee: surviving deploys, restarts, and partial failures, with idempotent recovery from every checkpoint.
• Multi-tenancy as a hard boundary. Database-enforced isolation between firms, with a test matrix that proves cross-tenant denial rather than assuming it.
• Service architecture and scale. Splitting document ingestion from API serving, per-tenant fairness so one firm's bulk upload can't starve another, connection pooling, regional deployment, load shedding, and per-tenant spend controls against model providers.
• Cloud and delivery. Infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, deploys, secrets, observability, on-call, and incident response. You'll take this over from our CTO, who currently holds all of it and is the bottleneck because of it.
• The jurisdiction abstraction. Build the architecture that models rules of court, local rules, judge standing orders, caption formats, and other jurisdiction-specific requirements as structured data rather than bespoke application code. The goal: adding a state should be a content problem, not an engineering project. This is one of the highest-leverage design decisions we'll make this year.
• Enterprise and compliance groundwork. SSO/SCIM, audit logging, retention, and the engineering half of SOC 2.

What we're looking for

• 7+ years building production Python backends, or equivalent demonstrated depth, with real expertise in async Python - you know what blocks an event loop and how to find out when something does.
• Serious Postgres. Schema design, query planning, migrations against live data, and ideally row-level security or another database-enforced tenancy model.
• Real infrastructure ownership. A major cloud, containers, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and production on-call. You've been paged and you've fixed the thing.
• Distributed job or workflow systems - Temporal, DBOS, Celery, arq