Founding Engineer (CTO Track) — Legal Tech Startup (Go & React)

Compensation: 4.0% – 8.0%

Important

We hope you will read this short job description, or at least skim what follows. If you are interested in this position (once you finish reading at least this first section), please simply write "I am interested" in the form here and press submit. If you'd like to tell us a bit more about yourself beyond that, please do. We loathe writing cover notes, so no judgement if you include nothing else.

We're serious and experienced people looking for another serious and experienced founder.

Here's where we are: After three years of working on this project, and pivoting numerous times, we are now going to the market with a (dare we claim) phenomenal Version 1 product for small and medium size law firms. We are also raising money imminently. So, being a pre-revenue and unfunded company, this is an equity-only role probably until the end of the year, at the latest.

We are two attorneys, one of whom is also a software engineer who has led engineering at multiple startups. We need a true CTO to completely own the tech stack while we build the business. This person must have come of age professionally before the advent of agentic coding tools and have great product sense. For the time being, for a whole bunch of reasons, we are sticking with Go as our core backend technology. If you don't like Go or have no experience shipping Go to prod, this is not the right fit. We use React on the frontend because we need to build frontends. Ideally, you have some security chops. You must be in the US. There's much more to say about all this, so if you think you might be a fit, please apply and let's talk it all out.

Now, we present you an LLM-generated job description:

About Us

We are a legal tech startup building a workflow platform for practicing lawyers that is missing in the market. 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 he does. It is built on a Go backend and a React frontend, delivered both in the browser and as a packaged Electron desktop app. It integrates with OpenAI to power the ".ai" part of the business, and the whole thing is backed by Postgres and AWS.

The important part (again): this is not a prototype. The product is production-grade and released. 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.

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 in the market with users. 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 recruit and lead the engineering team behind this product.

What You'll Do

• Own the technical roadmap and architecture across the Go backend, React frontend (web and the Electron desktop).
• Lead our LLM integration (OpenAI at the moment, with aims to integrate Anthropic as need be): 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.
• Lay the technical groundwork to bring on and lead an engineering team as we grow.

What We're Looking For

• A builder with great product instincts 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.