Backend Engineer
About Discernis
Discernis builds AI driven document intelligence for high stakes legal work. Because our customers handle privileged and regulated matters that most cloud AI cannot touch, we run on premises and in customer controlled environments as well as in the cloud. That makes security, reliability, and reproducibility core product features, not afterthoughts. We work with AmLaw firms and enterprise legal teams where accuracy, explainability, and data control are non negotiable.
The Role
You will build and extend the services that power our document platform and serve AI driven features to users. You will work closely with our engineering lead and our search and AI engineers, with plenty of well scoped, high impact problems in ingestion, processing, and retrieval, and real room to grow your scope as the platform does.
What You Will Do
Build and extend core backend services that power document ingestion, processing, and analysis
Build and maintain the APIs used by our frontend and internal AI services
Develop pipelines for PDFs, Office files, email containers, and OCR driven workflows
Improve performance across database access patterns and background task systems
Strengthen reliability through thoughtful testing, observability, and clean service boundaries
Contribute to authentication, authorization, and secure system design
Work with our search and AI engineers to support large scale indexing and retrieval
What You Bring
Professional Python backend experience
Experience with Flask, or a similar framework, and relational databases
Familiarity with background processing systems such as Celery
Exposure to search systems like Elasticsearch or OpenSearch is a plus
A habit of improving the quality, performance, and maintainability of the systems you work on
Comfort operating in a fast moving, product focused environment
Tech Environment
Python 3.11+, Flask, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, Docker
Skills Required
- Professional experience developing backend systems with Python
- Experience with Flask or a similar backend framework
- Experience working with relational databases
- Familiarity with background processing systems such as Celery
- Exposure to search systems such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch
- Experience improving system quality, performance, and maintainability
- Comfort working in a fast-moving, product-focused environment
What We Do
Discernis builds AI-native document-intelligence software for legal professionals handling litigation, investigations, and other high-stakes work. Its platform analyzes entire document collections—often millions of files—using cross-document analysis to surface key evidence and inform case strategy. Designed for security-sensitive customers, it can run on premises, in a customer-controlled cloud, or in hybrid environments, keeping inference within the organization rather than using third-party AI APIs.
