Staff Software Engineer II

As a Staff Software Engineer II at KeyCite, you will lead complex, business-critical engineering initiatives from architecture through production. You will modernise established platforms while maintaining the reliability that customers depend on, and you will set technical direction across teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead complex engineering initiatives, designing and delivering end-to-end solutions for large-scale, business-critical systems.

• Modernize core KeyCite platforms and services using modern architectural patterns without disrupting critical customer-facing products.

• Design distributed services, processing systems and APIs that meet demanding standards for performance, availability, scalability and maintainability.

• Lead architecture and design decisions across complex systems, balancing near-term delivery with long-term sustainability.

• Build scalable data-processing capabilities for large volumes of structured and unstructured legal content and metadata.

• Identify architectural constraints and systematically simplify, modernize or replace components, while enabling teams to keep delivering business value.

• Assess emerging technologies and architectural approaches based on measurable improvements to scalability, reliability, developer productivity and customer outcomes.

• Champion modern practices across design, development, testing, observability, security, deployment and operational ownership.

• Establish measurable standards for quality, reliability, security and maintainability.

• Work across engineering teams and with Product and Architecture to solve problems that span organizational and system boundaries.

• Partner with engineering and product leadership on long-term technical strategy.

• Establish patterns and standards that are adopted beyond your immediate team.

• Act as the technical authority for complex architecture and engineering decisions.

• Mentor engineers and develop senior engineering talent.

• Lead technical discussions and design reviews, and raise the engineering bar across the organization.

• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Translate business and product requirements into durable technical architectures.

• Make pragmatic trade-offs between feature delivery, modernization and technical debt.

• Identify opportunities to reuse platform capabilities rather than building bespoke solutions.

• Connect technical investment to measurable product and business outcomes.

• Recognize the importance of reliability and accuracy in systems that support professional research.

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in designing and delivering complex production software systems.

• Deep expertise in backend and distributed systems engineering.

• Strong experience with cloud-native architectures, preferably on AWS.

• Experience designing APIs, services and event-driven architectures.

• Experience with large-scale data processing and data pipelines.

• Strong understanding of system reliability, scalability, performance and observability.

• Experience modernizing complex legacy or long-lived production systems without disrupting existing customers.

• Strong programming skills, ideally in Java and/or Python.

• Experience with modern engineering practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation and production monitoring.

• Demonstrated ability to influence architecture and technical direction beyond an individual team.

• Ability to independently navigate ambiguous, highly complex technical problems.

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain architectural trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising technical standards across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with high-volume content, publishing, search or information-processing platforms.

• Experience with search and information retrieval technologies.

• Experience with large-scale metadata or knowledge systems.

• Experience with graph or relationship-oriented data models.

• Experience building platforms or services consumed by multiple products and engineering teams.

• Experience operating highly available, business-critical systems.

• Exposure to legal technology, professional information or other domains where accuracy, provenance and reliability are critical.

• Familiarity with AI-enabled applications and the backend and data infrastructure that supports them.

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connected.

• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: Flex My Way is a set of supportive workplace policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities, whether caring for family, giving back to the community, or finding time to refresh and reset. This builds upon our flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, empowering employees to achieve a better work-life balance.

• Career Development and Growth: By fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development, we prepare our talent to tackle tomorrow’s challenges and deliver real-world solutions. Our Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.

• Industry Competitive Benefits: We offer comprehensive benefit plans to include flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, access to the Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, employee incentive programs, and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.

• Culture: Globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more. We live by our values: Obsess over our Customers, Compete to Win, Challenge (Y)our Thinking, Act Fast / Learn Fast, and Stronger Together.

• Social Impact: Make an impact in your community with our Social Impact Institute. We offer employees two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.

• Making a Real-World Impact: We are one of the few companies globally that helps its customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency. Together, with the professionals and institutions we serve, we help uphold the rule of law, turn the wheels of commerce, catch bad actors, report the facts, and provide trusted, unbiased information to people all over the world.