Principal Software Engineer

At any given time, 16 million Americans are experiencing a crisis that requires urgent help from our legal system or government. The right assistance could transform their lives. But today, most never get it. 

Atticus makes it easy for any sick or injured person in crisis to get the life-changing aid they deserve. In just three years, we’ve become the leading platform connecting people with disabilities to government benefits. We also help victims of accidents, misconduct, and violence get compensation from insurance. So far, we’ve gotten thousands of people access to over $2B in life-changing aid, and we’re just getting started.

We've helped more than 20,000 people in need (see our 6,000+ five-star reviews) and raised more than $50 million from top VC firms like Forerunner, GV (Google Ventures), and True Ventures. (We just closed our Series B round in May 2023, so we're well-funded for the foreseeable future.) We're small but moving fast — our team grew from 52 to 91 last year and we expect to grow again in 2024.

To provide a great experience for a client, we have to do a lot quickly: Understand their situation, identify their needs, give advice, match them with the right lawyer, connect them to that lawyer, convince both parties to work together, and formalize the arrangement — all while doing our best to make a complex and scary system feel simple, accessible, and human. We’ve managed to do all of this in a way that users love, but we’ve done it by leaving some parts of the process quite manual... which means we can only scale so far.

Your job is to change that: to lead the effort to transform our product into a platform that can serve millions of people. You'll craft a strategic plan and roadmap that will enable our tech stack to scale 10x in volume we currently support and plant the seeds for 20x. The role mixes engineering strategy, architectural decisions, and people management. You will focus on leading a cross-functional team focused on building a highly performant, intuitive and secure client experience on the web for Atticus clients, lawyers, and our internal teams.

You will work with our VP of Engineering, COO, and Director of Product but work across many teams (including product, design, lawyer network, as well as client experience and marketing). 

• Help your team design, build and operate Atticus’ APIs with a focus on performance and reliability
• Plan roadmaps 3-6 months ahead but are deeply engaged on week to week operations. 
• Evaluate storage technologies and methodologies with an eye toward scalability and performance
• Architect, design, review, and test code in a collaborative environment with other software engineers.
• Leverage your team as multipliers for your skills to create excellent products and services
• Train other technical leaders on the team to do as you do.

• You've been the best engineer in the room before and you know how to get others there.
• You've led engineering teams with success on highly critical products.
• You’ve been leading engineering teams for 5+ years.
• You love fostering career growth and building a strong team culture.
• You care deeply about operational excellence (incident management, resilient systems, high availability, etc.)
• You proactively identify problems and opportunities and generate creative approaches to solve them.
• You're a champion of end user products and passionately collaborate with product and design.

We are strongly committed to building a diverse team. If you’re from a background that’s underrepresented in tech, we’d love to meet you.

This is a rare opportunity to join a startup that has strong traction (substantial funding, well-respected backers, tremendous growth, and many happy customers) but is still small enough that you can have a huge impact and play a role in shaping our culture.

We’re a certified B Corporation tackling a critical social problem. Our mission to help people in need drives everything we do, and your work here will touch many lives.

We offer competitive pay — including equity — and generous benefits:

• Medical and dental insurance with 100% of employee premiums covered
• 15 vacation days & ~19 paid holidays each year (including two weeks at end-of-year)
• Free membership to OneMedical
• $1,000 reimbursable stipend for education and training outside of work
• Student loan repayment assistance, 401(k), and optional HSA
• Free snacks, drinks, weekly lunches, and regular team dinners/events/retreats
• Humble, thoughtful, smart, fun colleagues 

We anticipate the base salary band for this role will be between $200,000 to $275,000 in addition to equity and benefits. The salary at offer will be determined by a number of factors such as candidate’s experience, knowledge, skills and abilities, as well as internal equity among our team.

Today, about half our team are in Los Angeles and half are fully remote and spread across the U.S. For this role you live in Los Angeles, work one day a week (or more) out of our beautiful office in the Arts District.