Senior Backend Engineer (Data) 1

## **About the role**

**We're growing the team that keeps our data infrastructure running and our archive growing. This is hands-on work at the intersection of Python, Django, and databases at real scale.**

**You will

**

• **Maintain and extend the hundreds of scrapers that continuously pull court data into our system**
• **Ingest millions of documents and merge them safely into our production database**
• **Help build and evolve the portal receiving our digitization work at the United States Library of Congress, where a team is scanning millions of pages**
• **Convert scanned material into structured text and documents, and merge it into the archive without breaking what's already there**
• **Work on the machine learning processes that identify and remove copyrighted material - a critical safeguard for a nonprofit like ours**
• **Design batch operations that run across five to ten million records efficiently, without taking the databases down**
• **Diagnose slow queries, review migrations, and be a person the team can rely on when something in the database needs a second pair of eyes**

## **Hard requirements**

**Please don't apply if you don't have real experience in these areas:**

• **Python, professionally and at depth**
• **Django - this is the framework we build on and the single most important skill for this role**
• **Strong database experience. We run Postgres, but we care more about your fundamentals than the specific engine: you should be comfortable reading an execution plan, tracking down why a query is slow, reasoning about indexes, and handling migrations that don't go as planned**
• **Web scraping - building, maintaining, and debugging scrapers in production**

## **Nice to have**

• **Celery, Redis, Kubernetes**
• **Machine learning applied to document processing (OCR, classification, extraction)**
• **Experience with legal data, civic tech, govtech, or open data**
• **Elasticsearch or similar search infrastructure**
• **A genuine interest in law, access to justice, or social justice work — it's what we do every day**