IT Senior Full Stack Engineer

Napoli Shkolnik is a national litigation firm representing individuals in matters involving defective prescription drugs and medical devices, asbestos-related illnesses, aviation accidents, complex litigation, and other serious personal injuries. For more than 22 years, the firm’s attorneys have achieved significant settlements, including high-profile cases related to World Trade Center first responders, major pharmaceuticals, and medical devices.

We are seeking Senior Full-Stack Engineers. Our platform runs today as Python services with a React front end on AWS. Our direction is Node.js and TypeScript on the back end, PostgreSQL as the system of record, and all infrastructure defined in Terraform. The work ahead is a mix of major projects: greenfield products, brownfield work modernizing the system in production, and likely porting its Python services to Node.js. You will work under the technical direction of our Lead Engineer, bring your own ideas to the architecture, and own your features end to end.

Who We're Looking For

Engineers who are hungry for major projects and find the work instead of waiting for it. On a team this size, nobody hands you a perfectly written ticket, and we are not looking for people who need one. In practice, that means you:

● See a problem a slow query, a flaky test, a missing alert and fix it or put a plan in front of the team, without being asked.

● Raise risks early with a proposed solution, write the design doc instead of waiting for one, and make decisions with the information available.

● Ship in small, frequent increments and stay with your work after it merges: deploy it, watch it, fix it.

● Finish. A task is done when it runs in production on real data, not when the pull request is opened.

Key Responsibilities

● Build greenfield products and services from a blank repository.

● Modernize and extend the existing system without disrupting the people who use it every day.

● Take on language ports most likely Python to Node.js capturing current behavior in tests before rewriting it.

● Own features end to end and into production: PostgreSQL schema and migrations, API, front end, tests, monitoring, and on-call.

● Build and maintain infrastructure in Terraform on AWS: environments, networking, compute, databases, secrets, and CI/CD pipelines.

● Build AI-powered features with structured outputs, evaluation sets, and measured accuracy.

● Review teammates' code and designs.

● Work directly with the attorneys and staff who use the platform, and turn feedback into prioritized work.

Technical Challenges

● Changing a live system: attorneys and staff use the platform every day and cannot lose work mid-case. Modernization and any language port happen incrementally, with parity tests, a rollback plan, and a named owner for every cutover.

● The existing code is the specification. AI tools can translate or refactor code quickly; proving the result behaves the same is the actual job.

● PostgreSQL holds confidential client data: schema design, migrations, and query performance are core engineering, not an ORM afterthought.

● AI output must be accurate and traceable to its source. In litigation, a wrong answer can end up in a court filing.

Qualifications

● 5+ years of professional full-stack experience, owning features from database to UI in production.

● Strong production experience with Node.js and TypeScript on the back end.

● Strong production experience with React or a comparable front-end framework.

● Strong PostgreSQL: schema design, indexing, query plans, migrations, and transactions.

● Terraform in production on AWS that you wrote and maintained yourself: modules, remote state, plan and apply in CI, multiple environments.

● Solid AWS fundamentals: IAM, VPC networking, container or serverless compute, managed PostgreSQL (RDS or Aurora), S3, and observability.

● Uses AI coding agents daily and can show how: supplying the right context, breaking down work, and verifying the output. You will demonstrate this during interviews.

● Has worked on both greenfield and brownfield systems: started something new, and improved something you inherited.

● A track record of initiative: work you started without being asked and carried through to production. Bring examples.

Preferred Skills

● Python, especially if you have ported Python code to Node.js or another language.

● Vue, or another modern front-end framework beyond React, such as Svelte or SolidJS.

● Shipping LLM-powered features to real users: structured outputs, prompt versioning, evaluation sets, and cost and latency trade-offs.

● Experience with an AI-native development methodology such as AWS AI-DLC (AI-Driven Development Life Cycle), Anthropic's AI-Native SDLC playbook, or an equivalent.

● Incremental modernization of live systems: strangler-fig patterns, parallel runs, and feature flags.

● Legal tech or other regulated domains, such as healthcare or financial services.

● Retrieval-augmented generation and vector search (pgvector especially), evaluation harnesses, and LLM tracing.

Engineering Standards

Infrastructure only through Terraform no console changes. A short design document before significant builds. Automated tests and code review on everything, including AI-written code. Observability structured logs, metrics, and tracing and audit logging are part of the definition of done. A feature is done when it runs on real data in production and can be run again.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our firm. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.