Senior Back End Engineer (Europe/Africa)

At smartvokat, we build digital process management applications for legal professionals. As digital transformation and legal tech are on the rise, we strive to be at the forefront of making the untapped potential of transformation accessible to all stakeholders. As part of our software engineering team, you ll work on exciting challenges which come with highly optimised workflow automation tools in a mostly regulated legal and compliance environment.

We are looking for new team members who possess robust experience in web application development, are keen to explore uncharted territory, and indulge in high-quality code. Ideally, you can balance turning around prototyping ideas quickly and writing stable, well-tested, and well-documented code.

As a geographically dispersed and virtual team, we look for team players with excellent communication skills and a passion for early-stage companies. You will contribute to building our architecture and processes as we scale and help to grow the software engineering team in the future. Your presence will make a difference to our applications portfolio and the company.

Tasks

Our primary product at smartvokat is called Workflows. Workflows will allow non-technical personnel primarily lawyers to harness the power of digitalisation and streamline their current processes. It will enable them to code without actually coding. Albeit not widely marketed, Workflows is already in production use.

Currently, these are the tasks on our development agenda:

• Working together with senior engineers on our notification system (WebSockets and email)
• Allowing customers to run their own code on our infrastructure, much like AWS Lambda, with a focus on performance. The challenge is to run a secure sandbox at scale while maintaining low latencies.
• Workflows is a flexible platform which dynamically adapts its GraphQL API based on use cases and integrations. The challenge is to do dynamic schemas per request while allowing external developers to change the schema without breaking things.
• We need a full-text search engine (Elasticsearch) for content on our platform, stored documents, and ingested logs for external developers.

We certainly have many more ideas, including artificial intelligence (e.g., NPL) and big data analysis (e.g., for electronic discovery).

Requirements

What we are looking for

• Solid understanding of how to build and optimize complex back end services.
• Experience using TypeScript, Node.js, and a desire to learn.
• Optional: Familiarity with GraphQL, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, and Docker.
• Optional: Familiarity with other languages and environments like Go or Rust.
• Well-versed with distributed version control systems (e.g., Git).
• Familiarity with continuous deployment and integration practices.
• Experience with DevOps tasks in general.
• Fluent in English with excellent communication skills.

Benefits

What we offer

• A team of entrepreneurial-minded colleagues who are on a mission.
• A flat hierarchy with lots of opportunities to develop your space .
• Mentorship and exposure to ground-breaking projects in the legal industry.
• Working in a virtual environment and still be part of an agile and highly collaborative team with a positive work atmosphere and rituals to make you feel connected.
• Autonomous nature of working remotely and integrating work in your life (not the other way round).
• Several perks designed for your well-being and a healthy work-life balance. (Have a look at our website)

How we hire

• We ll collect applications for 2-3 weeks when we have an open position. In this period we ll already start talking to people.
• You ll hear from us when we receive your application. If you don t hear from us within 24 hours, please get in touch.
• Once you ve submitted your application, the team will review your submission and may reach out for a short screening interview over video call. This call is usually 20-40 minutes, and we ll show you more about the company/product and like to hear about you.
• If you pass the screen, you ll be invited to 1-2 follow up interviews. We don t do coding challenges or take-home tests, but instead you ll get a problem brief that we would like to discuss. This helps us understand how you approach problems, what your thoughts and questions are, and what your solution may be. The preparation takes around 1-2 hours on average for our candidates.
• We aim to complete the whole process within 2-4 weeks after your screening interview.