Founding Engineer (CTO Track) — Production-Grade Legal Tech Startup

Compensation: 4.0% – 8.0%

About Us We are a legal tech startup building the workflow platform that practicing lawyers actually want. Our product reads a lawyer's email, automatically builds and organizes their matters, analyzes documents and correspondence, drafts communications, and keeps the attorney verifiably in control of everything it does. It is built on a Go backend and a React frontend, delivered both in the browser and as a packaged Electron desktop application, integrated with large language models, and backed by Postgres and AWS. The important part: this is not a prototype. The product is production-grade and weeks from release. The heavy foundational build is done. We are now at the stage every startup wants to reach, with a real product about to meet real users, and we need a founding engineer to help us launch it, iterate on it live, and scale it as we grow. We are a small, capital-efficient team led by a practicing attorney and a technologist with deep legal and operational experience. We move fast and ship constantly. The Role As our Founding Engineer you are the first engineer on the team and you own the technical direction of a product that is already live-quality and about to go to market. This is a hands-on, build-alongside-us role, not a manage-from-a-distance one. You will be in the code daily, shipping improvements, fixing what real usage exposes, and making architecture calls in real time as the product scales. We need someone who thrives at go-to-market speed: comfortable iterating on the fly, shipping in small frequent increments, and turning user feedback into shipped changes within days, not quarters. The product works today. Your job is to make it excellent under load and to keep it moving fast. This is a CTO-track role. We are looking for someone who can grow into the CTO seat as the company scales: own the full technical direction, and build and lead the engineering team behind this product. We expect to earn into that together as you prove yourself and the company grows. This role starts equity-heavy, with cash compensation increasing as we hit revenue and funding milestones. What You'll Do - Own the technical roadmap and architecture across the Go backend, React frontend, and the Electron desktop app, with a bias toward shipping and reliability under real user load. - Own the desktop release pipeline: Electron packaging, code-signing, and getting clean builds into users' hands. - Lead our LLM integration: prompt and pipeline quality, accuracy, cost, latency, and the guardrails that keep an AI product trustworthy for lawyers handling sensitive matters. - Harden data handling for a regulated audience: secure storage, processing, and retrieval of legal documents and communications. - Run a tight launch-and-iterate loop, turning live usage and customer feedback into shipped changes quickly. - Make pragmatic build-versus-buy and architecture decisions that keep a two-person team fast and the codebase maintainable. - Partner directly with the founding team on product priorities, demos, and early customers. - Lay the technical groundwork to bring on and lead an engineering team as we grow. What We're Looking For - A builder who ships. Proven track record taking software to production and keeping it healthy with real users on it, ideally as a CTO, founding engineer, or lead engineer in an early-stage startup. - Strong Go backend experience and comfort working across a React frontend. You do not need to be equally expert in both, but you need to be genuinely full-stack and unafraid of either side. - Experience shipping and maintaining an Electron desktop app, including packaging, code-signing, and release, is a strong plus. - Real experience integrating LLMs into production (OpenAI APIs or similar): not just calling an API, but managing accuracy, evaluation, cost, and reliability. - Solid grounding in data systems, APIs, and data security, ideally in a regulated domain like legal, healthcare, or finance. - Speed and judgment under ambiguity. You can iterate live, make good calls with incomplete information, and resist over-engineering. - An entrepreneurial mindset and genuine comfort with equity-weighted, early-stage compensation. - Excitement about legal tech and about building tools that give professionals their time back. What We Offer - Meaningful equity as our first engineer, granted directly from the founders' shares rather than a standard option pool, because we want this hire to have real ownership in a product that already exists and is about to launch. - A product, not a promise. You are joining at the moment of launch, not the moment of an empty repo. - Full remote flexibility, with a focus on what you ship. - A clear comp path: equity-heavy now, growing cash compensation as we reach revenue and funding milestones. - A path to CTO. This is a CTO-track role. As you prove yourself and we scale, the intent is for you to fully step into the CTO seat and build and lead the engineering team behind this product. If you are a builder who wants to launch and scale a production legal tech product, not start one from scratch, and you are energized by moving fast as we go to market, we would love to talk.