About the Role
This is a senior or staff-level engineering role at a fast-growing legal technology startup focused on high-skilled immigration. You will own the agentic systems and backend infrastructure that power complex, multi-step legal workflows, including document drafting, evidence review, and case-filing pipelines. The work spans workflow orchestration, backend service architecture, evaluation systems, and the APIs and interfaces that connect everything together. You will collaborate directly with the legal operations team, product, and customers every week, so proximity to the product and the people using it matters as much as the technical depth you bring.
The ideal candidate is a generalist with a strong backend lean, somewhere in the 60 to 80 percent backend range, who has operated close to the product in a small or early-stage environment. You have shipped production software end to end, thought carefully about how AI and LLM-powered systems behave in the real world, and can triage issues that surface on the frontend while knowing the root cause almost always lives in the backend. You are comfortable with ambiguity, you dig in independently, and you care about craft: clean APIs, well-structured data models, and systems that are observable and recoverable when things go wrong.
Key Responsibilities
- Build and maintain agentic systems that automate complex, multi-step legal workflows with human review and intervention at the right points
- Redesign task and workflow orchestration to support long-running work, dependencies, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery
- Develop evaluation infrastructure to measure output quality, catch regressions, and guide improvements to agents, prompts, and models
- Improve backend service architecture, event pipelines, and scheduled job infrastructure across a distributed codebase
- Make agent execution observable so the team can understand what happened, debug failures, and manage quality, latency, and cost
- Connect backend systems to internal tools and a user-facing portal, including the APIs and interfaces people need to supervise their work
- Triage frontend issues and own the supporting backend systems that drive them, including data modeling, access controls, and API design
- Collaborate with legal ops, product, and domain experts to turn nuanced real-world processes into reliable software behavior
Required Skills & Experience
- 5 or more years shipping production software, with a strong backend focus; 7 to 9 years preferred
- Hands-on experience building with LLMs beyond a basic chat interface, including tool use, context management, evaluation, and handling unreliable outputs
- Deep expertise in TypeScript; Python knowledge is a plus and can be developed if the backend and system fundamentals are strong
- Solid understanding of relational databases (Postgres or equivalent); experience with Python API frameworks such as FastAPI or Django is helpful but not required
- Experience with workflow orchestration and asynchronous systems: queues, events, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery
- Track record of leading projects end to end, from ambiguous requirements through deployment and ongoing operation
- Background as a founding or early engineer at a VC-backed startup, or clear evidence of 0-to-1 ownership on shipped products or active open-source projects
- Bachelor's degree or higher, preferably in Computer Science or a related field
Preferred Skills
- Experience operating agents in production or building eval infrastructure for LLM-powered systems
- Familiarity with complex document workflows or domain-specific AI applications
- Understanding of frontend build tooling and observability on both the client and server side
- Experience consolidating distributed or multi-repo codebases and improving overall system architecture
- Comfort working async and independently in a small, fast-moving team environment