Founding Full-Stack Engineer
Recruiting From Scratch · San Francisco, California ·
- Work mode
- Remote
- Category
- Fullstack
Founding Full-Stack Engineer
Location
San Francisco, CA
Fully onsite, 5 days per week.
Company Stage of Funding
Early-Stage / High-Growth AI Legal Technology Company
Office Type
On-site — 5 days per week
Salary
$180,000 – $250,000 Base
Equity
0.1% – 0.6%
Visa
Not open to visa sponsorship or visa transfers. US Citizens and Green Card holders only.
Experience
3–7 years of experience in full-stack software engineering, with strong ownership across backend, frontend, infrastructure, and AI-powered systems.
Employment Type
Full-time
Hiring Count
Early / Growth Hiring
Company Description
This is an early-stage AI company building an AI-native legal platform designed to fundamentally improve how legal work is delivered to fast-growing technology companies.
The company is building both the technology and the operational infrastructure around an AI-native approach to legal services. Its platform supports legal teams with AI-powered document review, intelligent drafting, legal research, case management, and conversational AI workflows.
The engineering team is extremely small, giving engineers significant influence over architecture, product direction, and execution. You will work across the entire stack, from PostgreSQL and Node.js on the backend to React and Next.js on the frontend, while also building agentic systems and the infrastructure required to make them reliable.
As a Founding Full-Stack Engineer, you will work directly with lawyers who use the product every day. You will identify problems, scope solutions, ship features end-to-end, and receive immediate feedback from real users.
This is a highly hands-on founding-level role for someone who enjoys building from scratch, working across the stack, and taking ownership without waiting for detailed specifications. Your work will directly shape the product, engineering culture, and technical foundation of the company.
What You Will Do
1. Build & Iterate on Agentic Systems
- Build and iterate on agentic systems that support real-world legal workflows.
- Develop agent harnesses, evaluations, interfaces, and supporting infrastructure.
- Design systems that are reliable enough for legal professionals to trust and use in production.
- Improve agent performance through evaluation, observability, testing, and iteration.
- Work with modern AI systems and integrate them deeply into product workflows.
- Build the technical infrastructure required to make AI-powered features reliable at scale.
2. Own Full-Stack Product Development
- Ship full-stack features from database and backend services through frontend user interfaces.
- Build client-facing product surfaces and internal tools used by legal professionals.
- Develop lawyer workspace functionality including review queues, document comparison and redline views, AI chat, and workflow tools.
- Work across PostgreSQL, Node.js, TypeScript, React, Next.js, and cloud infrastructure.
- Make architectural and technical decisions across the full application stack.
- Take features from initial problem definition through production deployment.
3. Build Integrations & Infrastructure
- Build integrations with Slack, email, document management, e-signature, billing, and other third-party platforms.
- Design reliable APIs and services that connect the product to external systems.
- Improve observability, infrastructure, testing, and operational reliability.
- Work with technologies such as AWS, tRPC, and Temporal.
- Build systems that support complex, asynchronous, AI-powered workflows.
- Identify opportunities to simplify architecture and improve engineering velocity.
4. Work Directly With Customers & Own Problems End-to-End
- Work directly with lawyers and legal professionals who use the product.
- Scope problems alongside users and quickly turn feedback into working product improvements.
- Collaborate closely with the founding team on product direction and technical priorities.
- Take initiative without waiting for detailed specifications.
- Balance product quality, engineering velocity, and real customer needs.
- Own projects from ambiguous initial requirements through implementation, launch, and iteration.
- Help establish engineering standards and technical culture as an early member of the team.
Ideal Candidate Background
Experience Requirements
- 3–7 years of professional software engineering experience.
- Strong full-stack engineering background with meaningful ownership across frontend and backend systems.
- Experience building and shipping production software end-to-end.
- Experience working in a startup, high-growth company, or highly autonomous engineering environment.
- Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous requirements and turn them into production-ready products.
- Experience owning projects from initial concept through deployment and iteration.
- Strong interest in AI-powered products and agentic systems.
- Comfortable working as an early engineer where responsibilities extend beyond a narrowly defined role.
Technical Requirements
- Strong TypeScript experience.
- Strong Node.js backend development experience.
- Strong React and Next.js experience.
- Experience working with PostgreSQL and relational databases.
- Experience building APIs and backend services.
- Experience with modern application architecture and full-stack development.
- Experience working with cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS.
- Experience with distributed or asynchronous workflows is valuable.
- Familiarity with technologies such as tRPC and Temporal is a plus.
- Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills.
- Ability to make pragmatic architecture and technical tradeoff decisions.
AI, LLM & Agent Requirements
- Hands-on experience building AI/LLM-powered applications.
- Understanding of agentic systems and AI application architecture.
- Experience building agent interfaces, orchestration, evaluation, or supporting infrastructure.
- Experience designing reliable AI-powered workflows.
- Understanding of AI evaluation, observability, testing, or failure handling.
- Ability to reason about the reliability and limitations of AI systems in production.
- Strong interest in rapidly evolving AI technologies and their practical application to real products.
Product & Full-Stack Engineering Requirements
- Strong ability to move between frontend, backend, database, and infrastructure work.
- Experience building polished user-facing applications.
- Experience designing APIs and integrating third-party systems.
- Experience working with complex workflows and data-heavy applications.
- Strong product sense and ability to translate user problems into technical solutions.
- Experience working directly with users or customers is strongly preferred.
- Comfortable owning both technical implementation and product decisions.
- Ability to balance speed of execution with long-term maintainability.
Soft Skills
- Exceptional ownership and accountability.
- Highly proactive and self-directed.
- Comfortable operating without detailed specifications.
- Strong product instincts.
- Clear and direct communicator.
- Strong problem-solving mindset.
- Comfortable receiving immediate feedback and iterating quickly.
- Able to work closely with founders and other early employees.
- Comfortable shifting priorities as the company evolves.
- Strong attention to detail.
- High technical curiosity.
- Strong startup mentality and willingness to build from scratch.
Compensation & Benefits
- $180,000 – $250,000 base salary.
- 0.1% – 0.6% equity.
- Meaningful early-stage equity opportunity.
- Relocation support for moves to San Francisco.
- Competitive salary and stock options.
- Opportunity to shape a product from the earliest stage.
- Regular in-person team gatherings.
- Small, highly collaborative founding team.
- Fully onsite in San Francisco.
Why Join
- Join at a genuinely early stage where your technical decisions can materially shape the company.
- Build AI-native software that is used by legal professionals in real workflows.
- Work across the entire stack rather than owning a narrow technical surface.
- Build agentic systems, evaluations, interfaces, and infrastructure from the ground up.
- Work directly with users and receive same-day feedback on what you build.
- Collaborate closely with founders and a small, highly technical team.
- Have significant ownership over architecture, product, and engineering standards.
- Work on complex problems at the intersection of AI, software, and professional services.
- Receive meaningful equity with substantial potential upside.
- Help establish the technical foundation and engineering culture of an early-stage company.