Software Engineer

ParaLeagle is an AI-powered immigration legal technology platform that automates U.S. work visa processing for mid-market IT staffing companies, starting with H-1B and now expanding across additional visa categories. Where traditional immigration attorneys charge $3,000–$5,000 per petition and take weeks, our platform delivers the same outcome at $350–$700 per petition with 95%+ accuracy, every case reviewed by a licensed immigration attorney before filing. We are a founding team of three: Mathew (CEO), JJ (CTO, former Google engineer), and Mary Kennedy (Chief Immigration Counsel, practicing immigration attorney). We are based in Chicago and backed by real revenue from real customers. This is not a slide deck company, the product exists and processes petitions today. We're growing our engineering team in India. Not a code monkey. Not someone to execute Jira tickets. We want a founding engineer; someone who thinks like an owner, moves fast, asks "why" before "how," and treats this company's success as their own. Why This Role Is Different Most early-career engineering roles in India slot you into a team of 50 where you own a single microservice. This role puts you shoulder-to-shoulder with the CTO of a US-incorporated startup, building core platform infrastructure that directly drives revenue. You will see the impact of your work in customer demos, pilot conversions, and petition approval rates — not buried in a sprint velocity chart. We believe AI tools like Claude have fundamentally changed what matters in a software engineer. Memorizing syntax, framework APIs, and design patterns is table stakes now — any engineer with Claude can produce functional code. What AI cannot replace is clear thinking, logical reasoning, intellectual curiosity, and the ability to decompose ambiguous problems into buildable solutions. That's what we're hiring for. What You'll Build Working directly with JJ and our engineering team, you will own significant portions of ParaLeagle's platform as we expand across new visa types and ship new product features: Product & Feature Development: Build out the core application — new features, new workflows, and the user-facing surfaces that staffing clients and our internal attorney team rely on every day. As we grow, you'll help turn a focused H-1B tool into a broad immigration platform. Multi-Visa Expansion: Help extend the platform beyond H-1B into additional visa categories. Each new visa type brings its own forms, eligibility logic, and filing rules — you'll design the systems that make adding a new category fast and reliable, instead of a one-off rebuild every time. Integrations: Connect ParaLeagle to HRIS platforms (BambooHR, ADP, Workday) so IT staffing clients can push employee data directly into our system. Build e-signature workflows, DOL wage database lookups, and eventually client-facing API documentation. Workflow Engine: Design the case lifecycle management system that tracks every petition from intake through attorney review, filing, and approval. Build the attorney review queue with priority scoring and automated status notifications. Platform Reliability: Own uptime, test coverage, deployment pipelines, and security fundamentals. Immigration data includes SSNs, passport numbers, and A-numbers — our clients trust us with the most sensitive information their employees have. You'll also work with the team on the document and forms stack that powers all of this: the GPT-4 Vision OCR pipeline that extracts data from passports, I-94 records, I-797 approval notices, EAD cards, and degree certificates with 95%+ accuracy, and the forms automation that auto-populates the I-129 (47+ fields), LCA filings, and support letters across our growing visa suite. Who You Are We care far more about how you think than what you already know. Must-Haves Strong first-principles thinking and mathematical/logical reasoning. You can take an ambiguous problem ("we need to figure out which SOC code fits this job description"), break it into sub-problems, identify the logic chain, and build a solution — without being told exactly how. Python proficiency with real project evidence. We don't mean certificates or course completions. Show us something you've built — a side project, a startup attempt, an open-source contribution, a tool you made because the existing ones annoyed you. We will dig deep into this. Ownership mindset. When something breaks at 9 PM, you don't wait for a ticket to be assigned. You fix it because it's your product. When a feature could be 10% better with an extra hour of work, you put in that hour because the difference matters to you personally. Hunger to prove yourself. You are competitive — not in a toxic way, but in the way athletes are competitive. You want to win, you push yourself under pressure, and you find confidence in performance, not titles. You go one step beyond what's expected because that's just who you are. Coachable and intellectually curious. You absorb feedback quickly, ask sharp questions, and are genuinely excited to learn new domains. Immigration law is complex — you don't need to know it, but you need to be the kind of person who wants to understand why an LCA posting has specific timing requirements. Quick, abstract thinking. You can hold complex systems in your head, reason about edge cases before they bite, and shift between high-level architecture and low-level debugging without losing context. When someone describes a workflow verbally, you're already sketching the data model. Strong Signals (Not Requirements) You've tried to build a startup, even if it failed. The experience of shipping a product under constraints, where you couldn't hide behind a team — is the closest analogue to what this role demands. Athletic or competitive background. People who have trained and competed in sports understand performing under pressure, taking coaching without ego, and the discipline of showing up every day whether they feel like it or not. Non-trivial side projects. Hackathon wins, open-source tools with actual users, a personal project that solves a real problem — anything that shows you write code because you can't help it, not just because it's your job. Experience with AI/LLM tooling. You use Claude, GPT, or similar tools as a thinking partner in your workflow. You understand that the value of an engineer in 2026 is not typing code faster — it's directing AI effectively and catching what it gets wrong. Exposure to document processing, OCR, or legal tech. Useful but absolutely not required. Curiosity and learning speed matter more than domain familiarity. What We Don't Care About Your college pedigree. Your certificate count. How many frameworks you can list on a resume. Whether you worked at a brand-name company. We care about what you've actually built, how you think through problems, and whether you have the drive to turn a pre-seed startup into a category leader. Compensation & Growth Base Salary $1,100/month ($13,200/year) Quarterly Performance Bonus Up to 25% of base ($275/month), tied to product delivery, code quality, and business impact metrics Automatic review at 2 months. Consistent high performers move to $1,300–$1,400/month. Growth Path As an early member of our founding engineering team, you have a clear path to engineering leadership as the team scales. Founding engineers who prove themselves become the people who build and lead teams. Our Interview Process Step 1: Application Review. Show us what you've built. Send us your resume and a link to a live project, GitHub repo, or a technical write-up of a system you designed. No cover letter needed — we value your code and your logic over your ability to write prose. Step 2: The Take-Home Challenge. Build something for us. Candidates who pass the initial screening will be invited to a focused, time-bound technical challenge. We don't believe in "brain teasers"; we'll ask you to solve a real-world problem or build a feature that mirrors the actual work you'll be doing here. Step 3: Technical Deep Dive. Walk us through your work. We'll spend this session digging into your take-home assignment and your past projects. We'll ask why you made specific architectural decisions, what you'd do differently with more time, and how you'd scale it. This is about separating deep experience from surface-level familiarity. Step 4: Founder Call with Mathew/JJ.

• Culture and mindset alignment. The final step is a conversation about vision. We're looking for "product-minded" engineers who care about the why as much as the how. This is where we figure out if we're building something together, not just filling a headcount.