Staff Software Engineer - Technical Lead

Job Type: Full-time, Exempt, Remote

Reports To: Manager, Software Engineering

Tech Stack: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Github Copilot

Job Overview

Our client providing legal technology services is seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for their next-generation product that accelerates law firm performance.

This is a high-impact individual contributor role for an engineer who excels at solving complex, ambiguous technical problems. You will help shape the technical direction, raise the bar for engineering craft, and mentor peers, all while partnering closely with engineering leadership and product to deliver on their priorities. Success in this role looks like consistently elevating the technical capability of the teams you work with and delivering complex initiatives that measurably improve their platform's scalability, reliability, and performance.

Key Responsibilities

· Lead the design and delivery of complex, cross-team technical initiatives that have a significant platform-wide impact.

· Set technical direction and establish engineering standards adopted across multiple teams, leading architecture and design reviews to ensure solutions are scalable, secure, and maintainable.

· Partner with engineering leadership, product management, and other technical leaders to translate business goals into sound technical strategy, providing technical context that informs roadmap and prioritization decisions.

· Drive adoption of AI-assisted and agentic software development practices across the team, establishing the standards, review practices, and guardrails that keep quality, security, and maintainability high as velocity increases.

· Drive the evaluation and adoption of new technologies, frameworks, and tools that improve developer productivity and system quality.

· Write and review production-quality code, remaining hands-on with the codebase and setting the standard for technical excellence.

· Take part in incident response along with the broader team and own the technical follow-through (root cause analysis, systemic remediation, and the durable improvements that reduce future incidents).

· Identify and resolve systemic technical risks, surfacing scalability, performance, and security concerns before they become critical.

· Mentor and coach engineers, raising the technical capability and career trajectory of the broader engineering organization.

Qualifications

· 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial work in Ruby on Rails and a modern JavaScript framework, with a proven track record of growth and technical leadership.

· Demonstrated ability to design and build high-quality, high-performance, highly available web applications and distributed systems at scale.

· Deep expertise in modern software architecture, including service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, and web application design.

· Proven experience designing and implementing automated test strategies throughout the software development lifecycle, including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, to ensure reliability and quality across complex workflows.

· Hands-on experience with modern AI tools and workflows (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate delivery, improve quality, support debugging, and scale team efficiency while maintaining technical ownership of outcomes.

· Practical experience with security and CI/CD best practices, deploying code to production frequently, safely, and reliably.

· Experience deploying, monitoring, and operating applications in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Heroku) with automated deployment pipelines and modern observability tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Honeycomb, Datadog).

· Strong track record of mentoring and elevating the technical skills of other engineers.

· Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical decisions across teams without direct authority.

· A bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field, or equivalent industry experience.

Additional Qualifications (Nice to Have)

· Experience developing accounting or financial software.

· Familiarity with law firms, legal practice, and law firm billing and accounting.

· Familiarity with Ember.js.

· Prior experience operating in a technical leadership capacity without formal people management responsibility.

Competencies

Technical Influence

Develops and evaluates different technical approaches, assesses tradeoffs, and drives alignment in a way that garners buy-in across the team without formal authority.

Communication

Communicates clearly in writing and speech, adapting technical content for audiences with varying levels of expertise. Writes with the clarity and precision that technical documentation demands.

Collaboration

Works effectively across teams and disciplines, facilitating productive discussions, encouraging diverse perspectives, and resolving technical disagreements constructively.

Mentorship

Invests in other engineers’ growth by providing thoughtful feedback and creating opportunities for their development.

Adaptability

Navigates ambiguity confidently and adjusts to shifting priorities, embracing iterative experimentation, learning, and development.

Accountability

Takes responsibility for outcomes and follows through on commitments, demonstrating professionalism and integrity in all interactions.