Backend Engineer, Foundations

Location - New York, NY - (On-site, 5 Days Per Week)

Compensation - $180,000 – $250,000 Base + Competitive Equity

Visa - Visa Sponsorship Available (Case-by-Case)

Company Stage - Seed Stage (10 Employees)

Industry - Artificial Intelligence, Legal AI, Knowledge Graphs, Enterprise Software, Distributed Systems, Data Infrastructure, Agentic AI

About the Company

The company is building the operating system for legal risk by combining AI-native workflows, knowledge graphs, legal ontologies, and multi-step agentic systems to automate complex legal analysis at enterprise scale.

Its platform transforms unstructured legal documents into structured, queryable legal intelligence, enabling enterprise customers to perform legal diligence, risk analysis, and document understanding in real time. By combining large language models, knowledge graphs, distributed data pipelines, and modern backend infrastructure, the company is redefining how legal work is performed.

Founded by top law firm partners alongside world-class AI researchers and engineers, the company is assembling a small, elite engineering team to build foundational infrastructure powering the next generation of AI-native legal software.

As a Backend Engineer, Foundations, you'll own the company's core backend infrastructure, knowledge graph architecture, distributed data pipelines, and backend services while partnering closely with AI researchers and platform engineers to build production-grade AI systems that power enterprise legal workflows.

This is an exceptional opportunity to join an AI-native startup where backend engineers own foundational platform architecture, influence technical direction, and build the core infrastructure supporting one of the most ambitious legal AI platforms in the market.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and scale the knowledge graph infrastructure powering the company's AI platform
• Architect distributed backend systems for processing large volumes of legal documents
• Build scalable data ingestion, transformation, and reconciliation pipelines using DAG-based workflows
• Design and develop production APIs supporting internal services, AI agents, and enterprise customers
• Build backend services using Python and modern distributed systems technologies
• Design scalable data architectures using Neo4j, PostgreSQL, Redis, and related technologies
• Develop workflow orchestration systems using Prefect and similar orchestration frameworks
• Operate and optimize Kubernetes infrastructure supporting production AI workloads
• Improve platform scalability, reliability, observability, and operational performance
• Partner closely with AI researchers to integrate agentic AI systems into production environments
• Establish engineering best practices across backend architecture, security, and platform reliability
• Continuously improve distributed systems supporting enterprise-scale legal AI workloads

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 3+ years of backend software engineering experience
• Experience building production backend systems at scale
• Experience working at fast-moving startups or high-growth technology companies
• Experience designing scalable distributed backend architectures
• Experience owning backend infrastructure with significant engineering impact
• Experience building APIs and data-intensive backend services
• Experience working with large-scale data processing pipelines
• Strong startup ownership mentality with demonstrated engineering execution
• Experience operating production infrastructure in cloud environments preferred
• Experience collaborating closely with AI or platform engineering teams preferred

Technical Requirements

• Strong backend engineering experience using Python
• Experience building scalable distributed systems
• Strong understanding of databases, data modeling, and system architecture
• Experience with PostgreSQL and Redis
• Experience working with Kubernetes in production
• Experience building workflow orchestration systems using Prefect, Airflow, Dagster, Temporal, or similar tools
• Experience designing production APIs and backend services
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across scalability, reliability, maintainability, and performance
• Experience with graph databases such as Neo4j preferred
• Experience with Go, Rust, Zig, Kafka, or cloud-native infrastructure preferred

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or another technical discipline preferred
• Strong software engineering background with demonstrated technical excellence
• Exceptional candidates with outstanding distributed systems experience considered

Soft Skills

• Strong systems thinking
• High ownership mentality
• Excellent technical communication
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity
• Strong collaboration skills
• Startup mentality with high execution velocity
• Structured problem solver
• Engineering leadership mindset
• Passion for distributed systems and backend infrastructure
• Excited to build AI-native developer platforms

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $180,000 – $250,000
• Competitive Equity Package
• Visa Sponsorship Available (Case-by-Case)
• Opportunity to build foundational infrastructure for AI-native legal technology
• Direct collaboration with founders, AI researchers, and engineering leadership
• Significant ownership across backend architecture and platform infrastructure
• High-impact engineering culture with exceptional career growth
• Fast-moving seed-stage startup with meaningful equity upside
• Opportunity to help define the future of AI-powered legal infrastructure

Why Join

This is an opportunity to build one of the most ambitious AI-native infrastructure platforms transforming the legal industry.

You'll work at the intersection of distributed systems, knowledge graphs, data infrastructure, Kubernetes, backend engineering, and agentic AI while architecting the foundational systems that power next-generation legal intelligence.

As a Backend Engineer, Foundations, you'll own mission-critical backend infrastructure, collaborate directly with world-class AI researchers and founders, and help build the technical foundation of one of the fastest-growing legal AI startups.