Senior Software Engineer - Backend (Hybrid)

ZipLiens•Franklin, TN

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

Zipliens is a leading lien resolution company that specializes in streamlining the lien process for personal injury law firms. Our work helps law firms operate more efficiently and helps the injured people they serve access settlement funds more quickly and accurately. We are looking for an engineer who is passionate about building the core systems and infrastructure that make complex, data-heavy products work at scale. We are looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join our team, building the next generation of applications for the legal industry. After several years of high growth, Zipliens has become a leader in lien resolution, a process required in most personal injury settlements. The software we build supports that work, giving it clear, real-world impact beyond the technical challenges. We're scaling engineering significantly this year. You'd be joining a backend codebase with established patterns and helping extend those patterns as the team grows several times over. You'll have context available rather than a blank slate, and your judgment will shape what comes next rather than just inheriting it. We also build with AI as a first-class part of the workflow: agentic coding tools, plus internal skills and harnesses we've written ourselves. Not autocomplete. You'd be expected to use them well and to improve them.

Requirements

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). You should understand the infrastructure your services run on, not treat it as someone else's problem.
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.

Nice To Haves

Experience with document processing or extraction from unstructured data.
Working knowledge of React and JavaScript. Backend is the focus, but we'd like someone who can pick up frontend work when it unblocks them.
Familiarity with Kubernetes. We have an SRE who owns the cluster - you won't be running it, but you'll be deploying to it and debugging your services in it.
Experience handling sensitive data such as PHI, or working under HIPAA-style requirements.

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.