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

• 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

Originally posted on Himalayas