Founding CTO – AI Legal Tech (SF Bay Area)
About The Position
Our client is an early-stage, San Francisco-based AI startup building the operating system for family law. Their platform automates the most time-intensive parts of legal practice — client intake, financial disclosures, document preparation, case management, and client collaboration — helping family law firms modernize and scale without adding headcount. Founded in 2025, the company is already working with real customers and actively closing a seed round, with $XM signed to date. The Mission is to reduce the emotional and financial burden of divorce for millions of families — and empower the legal professionals who serve them — by transforming a fragmented, manual process into a guided, intelligent, AI-driven experience. This is a co-founder seat, not a hire. You're joining at the inflection point: real product, real customers, seed round closing. As the first technical leader, you'll own the full stack — architecture, AI infrastructure, engineering culture, and execution velocity. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the founding team to define how AI reshapes one of the largest, most underserved verticals in legal services. If you've been waiting for a founding opportunity where the market is real, the mission matters, and the equity is worth the bet — this is it.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 3–5+ years in technical leadership
- Deeply hands-on — you still write and ship production code regularly
- Proven experience building AI-native, workflow-heavy, or document-centric SaaS products
- Proficiency with modern AI/ML stacks: LLMs, RAG, and agentic frameworks (LangChain/LangGraph, OpenAI/Claude APIs)
- Strong backend and cloud infrastructure expertise (GCP/AWS, Python, Node.js, Kubernetes)
- Experience building engineering teams in a 0→1 environment
- Based in the SF Bay Area or willing to relocate
- Financially comfortable with a founder salary model during the build phase — equity is the upside
Nice To Haves
- Exposure to legal tech, compliance-heavy, or regulated-industry products
- Experience with document automation platforms
- Prior founding experience or early employee (1–50 person company)
- Background at Big Tech or high-growth SaaS
- Genuine interest in access to justice and modernizing legal services
Responsibilities
- Own and define end-to-end technical architecture of the platform
- Write and ship production code daily alongside the founding team
- Architect and scale AI agent infrastructure for legal workflows — billing, financial layers, document automation, collections, and client collaboration
- Build and scale the engineering team from scratch — hiring, mentoring, and establishing culture
- Partner with founders on product roadmap, fundraising narrative, and company strategy
- Ensure security, compliance, and scalability of a document-heavy, regulated-industry platform
- Drive rapid iteration cycles and maintain startup velocity through seed close and beyond
Benefits
- 8-10% founder-level equity
- Base salary: ~$4,000/month during the pre-seed phase
- Equity is the upside, structured for long-term wealth creation
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
