Full Stack Engineer for Immigration Justice

You will be a pivotal full stack engineer, responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining our entire application stack—from backend services and APIs to frontend user interfaces. This is an integral role on our small but mighty team that will help us expand our initial success and take Pathfinder national. You'll contribute across the stack, building robust and scalable solutions that directly impact our users, specifically helping to navigate immigrants through the legal process and empower legal aid workers.

If you are a seasoned engineer who doesn’t mind vibe coding to work stronger/better/faster and want your code to make a difference in the immigration space, we’d love to talk to you.

Core Responsibilities

Develop & Deploy: Build and maintain scalable backend APIs and services using Python (FastAPI/Django/Flask), ensuring high performance and responsiveness for handling hundreds of millions of collected data records.

Frontend Development: Craft intuitive and engaging user interfaces with React/Next.js and TailwindCSS, focusing on user experience and accessibility for immigration attorneys and nonprofits.

Database Management: Design, implement, and optimize database schemas and queries, primarily with PostgreSQL, ensuring data integrity and efficient retrieval for complex legal histories.

Data Integration: Develop and manage data pipelines to collect, process, and transform various data sources, incorporating advanced scraping techniques and AI/LLM integrations to analyze "an ocean of data" and unstructured legal documents, memos, and executive orders.

Infrastructure & DevOps: Contribute to our cloud infrastructure (e.g., GCP/Heroku) and CI/CD pipelines, focusing on automation, scalability, and reliability as we expand our nationwide impact.

Error-proof & Test: Implement robust testing strategies across the stack (unit, integration, end-to-end) and monitor systems to ensure accuracy, stability, and reproducibility, particularly for critical alerts and insights that reduce deportations.

Collaborate & Communicate: Work closely with product, design, and data teams to translate requirements into technical solutions. Clearly communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, including legal professionals, reporters, and advocates.

Document: Write clear and comprehensive documentation for code, APIs, and system architecture to facilitate onboarding and troubleshooting.

Your First Year…

End-to-End Feature Ownership: You independently designed, built, and launched 2-3 significant full-stack features from conception to production that directly contribute to reducing deportations or increasing the number of immigrants served by our partners.

Scalability & Performance: You identified and implemented key optimizations that significantly improved the performance and scalability of our core application, handling a substantial increase in daily immigration cases tracked, especially as our network of nonprofits and attorneys continues to double.

API & Data Expertise: You established well-documented and robust APIs, enabling seamless integration with new data sources and third-party services, enhancing our ability to deliver timely, actionable data.

Code Quality & Best Practices: You championed and integrated best practices in code quality, testing, and deployment, elevating the overall engineering standards within the team, ensuring Pathfinder remains sharp, current, and actionable amidst rapidly changing law.

Cross-Functional Impact: You built trusted relationships with product and design teams, effectively translating their vision into technical realities and proactively identifying opportunities for improvement that directly support our mission of fair access to justice.

Minimum Qualifications

2–5 years of experience as a full stack engineer, with a strong portfolio demonstrating proficiency in both backend and frontend development.

Expertise in Python for backend development (Django, Heroku).

Strong proficiency in modern JavaScript/TypeScript and React/Next.js for frontend development.

Solid understanding of SQL and experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, as well as orchestrating ETL data pipeline development.

Proven experience with web scraping techniques, including handling complex sites (rate limits, JavaScript, CAPTCHAs) to collect vast amounts of court records.

Up-to-date knowledge and strong experience in AI prompting and knowledge of various LLM platforms and models’ strengths and weaknesses, with practical application in analyzing and classifying legal data to provide predictive insights.

Familiarity with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) and DevOps principles (CI/CD, containerization).

Strong communicator—clear, direct, and collaborative. You speak up when you have a view, listen when others do, and follow direction when the team makes a call.

Meticulous attention to detail; you take data and application accuracy seriously, especially given the high stakes of immigration cases.

Comfortable with ambiguity and fast-changing priorities in a startup environment, especially as immigration law changes swiftly.

Comfortable owning high-impact projects in a fast-paced environment, and willing to put in extra effort when a deadline or mission-critical moment calls for it.

Strong alignment with our mission of increasing fair access to justice and empowering immigrants through data and technology.

Bachelor’s degree or related experience in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field.