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

## About the company 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 founder