Careers
Two open roles. One product that updates itself.
VerdictWiki is a neutral encyclopedia of major legal cases — mass torts, class actions, settlements and landmark verdicts — compiled from public court records and regulatory sources, and kept current by an automated pipeline. We are a small remote team; every hire owns a visible part of the product.
The product in one paragraph
What you would be building
Signals from primary sources (CourtListener/RECAP, FDA, JPML, CPSC, NHTSA) flow into a Payload CMS 3 core on Postgres, out to static Astro 5 sites, and into a real-time lead funnel for law firms.
The stack is deliberately boring and fast: a pnpm/turborepo monorepo with a content core (Payload 3 + Next.js + Postgres), SSG marketing sites (Astro 5 with React islands), background agents on a Postgres-backed queue, and shared TypeScript contracts (zod) between the layers. Publishing is gated: facts about money and verdicts ("red zone") only ship after legal review, enforced by a lint step in the build.
Open role · Engineering
Senior Frontend Developer (JavaScript / TypeScript)
You will own the layer between our data core and what readers see: hundreds of SEO pages generated from structured legal data, interactive islands where it matters (eligibility wizard, “Notify me” subscriptions), and the agents that keep the data honest.
You will work on
- SSG sites on Astro 5 — hybrid mode (static pages + server islands), React 18 islands, TypeScript; multi-country variants (US, CA, KR, GB, JP) from one content core.
- Content core on Payload CMS 3 (Next.js + Postgres): collections, access control, the content-snapshot API the sites build against (offline-first builds).
- Background agents (Node/TS on pg-boss): docket monitoring, source ingestion (CourtListener/RECAP, FDA, JPML), content pipeline and notification tasks.
- Data contracts — zod schemas in a shared package, plus a red-zone lint that fails the build if an unreviewed figure or promise ships.
- SEO layer — custom sitemap with per-page lastmod, JSON-LD (LegalCase, FAQ, Breadcrumb), hreflang, Core Web Vitals on generated pages.
- Delivery — pnpm monorepo (turborepo), systemd + Caddy on a VPS, acceptance checklists after every release.
Required
- 4+ years of professional JavaScript/TypeScript; React 18 with SSR/SSG in production.
- Astro 5 (or equivalent: Next.js static generation / Nuxt) — hybrid rendering, islands, adapters.
- Node.js backend: REST/GraphQL APIs; a headless CMS you have actually shipped (Payload, Strapi or similar).
- Postgres day to day: queries, migrations, Postgres-backed queues (pg-boss, BullMQ or similar).
- TypeScript end to end; schema validation (zod or similar); pnpm workspaces + turborepo (or similar monorepo tooling).
- SEO fundamentals: semantic HTML, JSON-LD, XML sitemaps, hreflang, Core Web Vitals.
- English B2+ — the product, the docs and the reviews are in English.
Nice to have
- Experience building data pipelines / ingestion agents (parsers, ETL, idempotent upserts).
- Work with court data (CourtListener/RECAP, PACER) or any regulated-content review workflow.
- Consent-critical forms (TCPA), self-hosted CAPTCHA (e.g. Cap.js).
- Multi-tenant SSG: several sites generated from one content core.
Open role · Product & Delivery
Project Manager (Engineering & Product)
You will be the person the product ships through: turning a multi-country legal encyclopedia and its data pipeline into predictable, measured progress — with a legal review workflow and a lead funnel where compliance is part of the definition of done.
You will work on
- Roadmap & phases — the encyclopedia grows country by country (US now; CA, KR, GB, JP in the pipeline). You own sequencing, scope and acceptance per phase.
- Data pipeline health — sources (court records, FDA, JPML, CPSC, NHTSA) to published pages: SLAs, data quality, the “Last verified” stamp, incident notes when a source breaks.
- Legal review workflow (“red zone”) — settlement amounts and verdicts publish only after counsel review. You run the process (drafts, approvers, turnaround) — not the legal conclusions.
- SEO — indexation coverage, Search Console monitoring, query-to-page mapping, per-page lastmod; what to build next when the data says so.
- Lead funnel — case qualification forms with TCPA consent, real-time lead sales to law firms: volume, quality, compliance, feedback loop.
- Delivery discipline — build gates (red-zone lint), deploy runbooks, post-release acceptance, honest phase reports.
Required
- 3+ years as a project/product manager in an engineering team shipping a data- or content-driven product.
- Hands-on SEO experience: indexation, search console, E-E-A-T, what a “thin page” is and how to kill it.
- Technical fluency — you read APIs, schemas and runbooks, talk to engineers without a translator, and can tell a real regression from noise.
- Process you have built, not inherited: phases, checklists, runbooks, incident write-ups.
- English B2+ — all docs, reviews and stakeholder communication are in English.
Nice to have
- Legaltech, insurance or compliance background (TCPA, GDPR) — or at least forms with consent requirements you have shipped.
- Experience with content platforms or programmatic SEO at scale.
- Working with outside counsel on a regular cadence.
How to apply
One email to [email protected] with the role name in the subject: your CV, 2–3 links (GitHub/portfolio for developers; process or product write-ups for PMs), and two or three sentences on what in VerdictWiki you would want to build first. We reply to every application within a week.