Senior Software Engineer

Laws.Africa is hiring a senior, full-stack Python/Web developer to join our team building cutting-edge legal research applications for Africa and beyond. Over 1 million visitors use our products every month, supporting the rule of law, business, government and human rights.

What makes it fun and challenging? We have over 10 million pages of public legal information (with more added daily) and we need to make that discoverable and useful to our users. We extract structural information, build citation networks, automate metadata extraction, perform network analysis, build dashboards for insights and analysis, and use LLMs for automation and to help our users make sense of it all.

Join our small team of developers and get involved with all aspects of our applications, including strategy, design, implementation, data analytics, devops and support.

Our tech stack includes Python, Django, PostgreSQL, Vue, Elasticsearch, LLMs, AWS (EC2, S3, RDS), Dokku and Docker. Most of our software is open source at github.com/laws-africa.

Ditch the on-call rotations, get your weekends back, work on stuff that matters.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the CTO and leadership to determine the technical strategy for Laws.Africa.
• Design, build, deploy and support services and web applications that improve access to legal information
• Data analytics to explore and understand our corpus
• Monitor and optimize the performance of web applications
• Participate in project planning and estimation
• Provide technical leadership, guidance and mentoring to the junior team members
• Be a vocal advocate for a high quality user experience

How we work

• We’re a small technical team that Gets Things Done and delivers remarkable value to our users.
• Our software is mature and stable, and we work with proven technology, not the latest shiny new thing.
• We all work remotely, with team members in South Africa, Kenya, Senegal and Spain.

Requirements

• 5+ years Python experience
• 3+ years Django experience
• Highly proficient with all aspects of backend development (design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, operations)
• Comfortable with basic aspects of frontend development (HTML, CSS, Javascript)
• Clear communicator, both written and spoken
• Avoid “not invented here” syndrome
• An interest in the law is beneficial
• Experience with data analytics and machine learning is beneficial
• Experience with Akoma Ntoso or XML is beneficial