Senior Software Engineer
Summary
Senior software engineer at a legal-tech startup building software that helps law firms generate case documents from complex sources like police reports and medical records. Day to day: building Express.js/Node.js APIs and data pipelines, React frontends, and LLM prompting systems, plus code review, testing, and mentoring. Remote within the U.S.
Location: Remote (U.S.)
Reports to: Director of Engineering
Experience: 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
Compensation: $170K–$220K base + equity
About the Team
At Arches, we build legal tech software that helps law firms create case documents from complex sources, using an Express (Node.js), MongoDB, and React architecture. By lowering the cost of litigation, our software lets firms take on cases that would otherwise be dropped — creating real, life-changing impact for plaintiffs.
We're a remote-first startup where you'll quickly gain ownership over what you build and collaborate closely across teams.
About the Role
You'll help architect and build Arches’ next generation of legal software — spanning backend systems, APIs, frontend, and LLM prompting systems that work with police reports, images, medical records, maps, and more.
In This Role, You Will
- Translate product specifications into software
- Expand our Express.js APIs, backend data pipelines, React components, and hooks
- Review code, test new features, and write unit tests
- Help shape engineering architecture, technical standards, and platform strategy
- Write and improve LLM prompting systems
- Mentor other engineers, including offshore team members, and help raise the technical bar across the organization
You Might Thrive Here If You
- Have high agency — you solve problems without waiting for direction
- Enjoy shipping real products that customers use every day
- Balance architecture quality with execution speed
- Care deeply about usability and customer workflows
- Prefer fast-moving environments over heavy process
Expected Skills
- Strong experience with MongoDB or a similar NoSQL database
- Strong experience with functional programming in JavaScript
- Experience building production-grade SaaS platforms and APIs
- Experience with React
Nice to Have
- Experience building products with customer-facing LLM results
- Experience with the docx package or other dynamic Word document manipulation
- Hydrology background
- Experience with Terraform
- Startup or high-growth company experience
What to Expect in an Interview
- Given messy React code, refactor it into a "dumb" component and a hook
- Given an LLM prompt, describe how you'd improve it
- Given a document schema, describe the queries you'd use
- Given a business need, design an API
- Refactor some backend code
- Discuss an improvement you've made to a SaaS product and its impact on users
Why Join Us
- Significant product ownership from day one — shape the architecture and direction of a product still being defined
- Meaningful impact — your work directly lowers the cost of litigation for real plaintiffs
- Fast-moving, low-bureaucracy environment where builders thrive
- Health/dental/vision coverage, unlimited PTO, and equity in a rapidly growing early-stage startup
