DISCO is a legal tech software company. Our objective is to own the legal tech market and become the leader in legal as Salesforce has done in the sales technology space. Given the massive growth of data over the last 20 years, poorly built legal technology products have severely decreased lawyers' ability to practice law. 

Our fundamental mission includes building a unified technology platform for the practice of law, composed of 7+ products released over the next 10 years. Great technology can solve problems of scale in data, in laws, and in business operations that have distracted lawyers from doing what they went to law school to do. DISCO is fixing the law by automating the parts of the practice that can be automated so that great lawyers can focus on tasks that really do require human legal judgment.

To date, we have substantially disrupted the legal tech market with a lawyer inspired consumer-grade interface and a cloud-enabled technology platform that offers unprecedented performance and cost savings. Thoughtful product planning and product design are core tenets in our “product first” business strategy and culture. 

We intend to build a multi-billion dollar business and think you should come along for the ride because:

• DISCO is a very successful company more than doubling revenue every year for the last 5 years. We were the first movers to a cloud-based platform that has caused mass disruption within our market.
• Our CEO is a true market visionary. He graduated with a computer science degree at the age of 15 and followed with a JD from Harvard Law School at the age of 19. His unparalleled insights into the fundamental issues in legal and the potential of technology and artificial intelligence to change our market at its core provide the guiding light for DISCO’s long-term strategy.
• We believe that product delivery professionals including product managers, product designers and engineers differ from one another by at least a factor of 10. At DISCO, we only hire the top 1%, pay them well, and with equity, everyone has effectively been getting a raise each and every day. Given our product first mindset, product professionals are very much stars of the show. Our logo, the circle and square, represents the best lawyers and the best product professionals in the world.
• We measure product delivery velocity by dollars of revenue per line of code, vs simply lines of code. This drives a very thoughtful and deliberate product design and development process that ensures we’re going to make money when we ship products. We hire many more product managers and designers per engineer than most companies to ensure that our engineers have a disambiguated product intent when they are building.
• As a rule, we don’t commit to external product delivery dates as we believe that unnecessarily constrains our creativity from both a product and technology point of view.
• At DISCO respect isn’t earned; it is assumed. Good humans inherently treat everyone respectfully. This is a very important concept at DISCO.
• Given the high level of talent at DISCO, the cutting-edge cloud-based technology stack, and thoughtful and novel product and design approach, you’ll find yourself learning at a rate you’ve not likely experienced in your career. Given that we only hire professionals that are passionate about their craft, you’ll truly enjoy building a great software product and get in the best “career shape” of your life.
• Over the next 4 years, we’ll be growing our product delivery organization from 85 professional to 500+. There will be incredible growth opportunities along the way.
• We use the “2 Pizza Team” organization design where small autonomous teams own a piece of a product or platform and ship software at rates comparable to a very lean and scrappy startup. We achieve consistency across these teams in the areas of design, product-wide use cases and technical concerns through a strategically focused set of overlay functions.
• Finally, while we’re an incredibly fast growing organization, as a rule, we do not work crazy long hours. We believe in continuous product delivery, continuous product planning and design, continuous regular sleep schedules, continuous regular vacation, and continuous fun if you’re passionate about your craft.

If you want to win while getting better than you’ve ever been, come to DISCO.

Your Impact

As a Lead Software Architect, you will focus on identifying the architectural patterns that can provide leverage across a growing number of Feature Teams working together in a federated development model. You will drive the architecture of the Application Subsystems towards our aspirational goal of everything ‘well-crafted’. We don’t mean perfect but rather delivering real customer value as we pursue ‘high marks’ on these Architecture Quality Attributes: 

Availability, Scalability, Interoperability, Modifiability, Performance, Security, Testability 

What You'll DoTechnical Responsibilities:

• Taking ownership of the technical design, grooming, and prioritization of the application architecture backlog.
• Working with other teams to identify and prioritize the application architecture concerns that can provide the most business value.
• It might also include designing application-wide services and architecture patterns such as:
  • An application protocol that supports distributed tracing, logging, and application performance monitoring.
  • Generative systems that provide leverage to drive feature development velocity.
  • A fully asynchronous application architecture to improve availability, scalability, and extensibility.
  • A reusable, web application tech stack to enhance development speed and drive consistent implementation of best practices.

Leadership Responsibilities:

• Help lesser experienced team members decompose problems into subparts (i.e. divide and conquer) and understand how the parts synthesize into a solution.
• Maintain a well-groomed backlog.
• Using technical or business context, mentor engineers by turning ambiguity into clarity.

Who You Are

• Ability to design and communicate external and internal architectural perspectives of well-encapsulated systems (e.g. Service Oriented Architecture, Docker based Services, micro-services).
• Prior experience building and operating distributed web application systems while embracing the discipline of Site Reliability Engineering.
• Strong in API and Data Model Design and Implementation including how to scale out, make highly available, and map to storage systems.
• Ability to design and implement a layered application architecture that can be easily changed to accommodate evolving business requirements.
• An understanding of how to design and develop from a Security Perspective.
• Prior experience with multiple software stacks, have opinions and preferences, and not be married to a specific stack.

Even Better If You Have...

• Experience designing and operating software in a Cloud Provider such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with some amount of cloud-based data storage technologies such as: Relational Databases, NoSql Stores, data caches, etc.
• Used Feature or Release Toggles as a code branching strategy.
• Know how to select and extending 3rd party components (commercial or open-source) that provide operational leverage, but do not constrain our product and engineering creativity.
• Experience with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment with an emphasis on a well-maintained testing pyramid.
• Experience designing, modifying, and operating multi-tenant systems.

DISCO's Technology Stack

• Cloud Provider - AWS: EC2, Lambda, Aurora MySQL, Redshift, DynamoDB, ECS, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, S3, CloudFront, CloudFormation, SageMaker, KMS, CodePipeline, etc
• DSL-based Search: multiple large scale Elasticsearch Clusters searched using our Disco Query Language (DQL)
• Event Bus: Kafka and Schema Registry
• 3rd Party Vendors: Redis, Auth0 for Cloud Identity Federation (SSO, SAML, etc).
• AI: MinHash, Word2Vec, Convolution Neural Nets, Algorithmia (Lambda with GPUs) for training, PyTorch, Recurrent Neural Networks, Latent Dirichlet Allocation for Topic Modeling, etc.
• CI/CD: Terraform, Docker (via ECS), Jenkins, CodePipeline, GitHub, Artifactory, Consul for: App Config, Service Discovery, Shared Secrets.
• Visibility: ELK Stack for logging, Data Dog, New Relic, Sentry.io
• Programming Languages: Python / Flask, JavaScript, C#/.NET, Java.
• Transport Mechanisms: Protobuf, Avro, HTTP Rest/JSON