Founding CTO, AI Legal Tech (SF Bay Area)

The role

As a co-founder, you will own the full technical stack, including architecture, AI infrastructure, and engineering culture. You will build and scale the engineering team and partner with founders on product roadmap and company strategy.

What you will do

• Own and define end-to-end technical architecture of the platform
• Write and ship production code daily alongside the founding team
• Architect and scale AI agent infrastructure for legal workflows
• Build and scale the engineering team from scratch
• Partner with founders on product roadmap, fundraising narrative, and company strategy
• Ensure security, compliance, and scalability of a document-heavy, regulated-industry platform
• Drive rapid iteration cycles and maintain startup velocity

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience
• 3–5+ years in technical leadership
• Deeply hands-on experience writing and shipping production code regularly
• Proven experience building AI-native, workflow-heavy, or document-centric SaaS products
• Proficiency with modern AI/ML stacks: LLMs, RAG, and agentic frameworks (LangChain/LangGraph, OpenAI/Claude APIs)
• Strong backend and cloud infrastructure expertise (GCP/AWS, Python, Node.js, Kubernetes)
• Experience building engineering teams in a 0→1 environment
• Based in the SF Bay Area or willing to relocate
• Financially comfortable with a founder salary model during the build phase

Nice to have

• Exposure to legal tech, compliance-heavy, or regulated-industry products
• Experience with document automation platforms
• Prior founding experience or early employee (1–50 person company)
• Background at Big Tech or high-growth SaaS
• Genuine interest in access to justice and modernizing legal services

Benefits

• 7-10% founder-level equity
• Co-founder title and seat

Before you apply

• Intro Call
• Level 1 — Technical Deep-Dive
• Level 2 — Take-Home or Live Build Exercise
• Level 3 — In-Person Co-Founder Day (half day, SF)
• Reference Checks

About the company

The client is an early-stage, San Francisco-based AI startup building the operating system for family law. They automate parts of legal practice like client intake, financial disclosures, and document preparation.