Product Engineer (Backend)

Alaro

16h•Hybrid

About The Position

Alaro is building the next generation of legal services. We’re an AI-native law firm, built from day one around AI and data. Legal is a trillion-dollar global industry that still operates as if software never happened. Lawyers spend too much time on low-leverage work and too little on judgment, reasoning, and outcomes. AI is now rapidly realigning what’s possible. We believe AI doesn’t replace legal judgment - it replaces the operating model around it. Firms that rebuild around this shift will define the next era of legal services; others will struggle to justify their costs as AI reshapes client expectations. We started Alaro in April 2025 and raised a $2M pre-seed followed by an $7M seed led by a tier-1 US VC. Our product is used daily by our own lawyers on real cases, creating a tight feedback loop between product and practice. With early customers and a world-class engineering team taking shape, it’s still day one - come build with us. How we work: We move fast, then solidify: We ship early to get real work into lawyers’ hands, then invest in stabilizing and improving what matters. Progress beats polish, but quality is non-negotiable. High ownership, flexible schedules: We care about outcomes. You’re trusted to manage your time and take responsibility for what you ship, closing loops when things break. AI-native by default: We use AI everywhere, not just in the product. Our codebase and workflows are designed so humans and agents work together. Remote-first, globally aligned: We work as a distributed team, stay tightly aligned through regular syncs, and get together in person when it matters. About the Role: You will build the backend systems that make Alaro’s product reliable, extensible, and safe to use in real legal work. These systems power everything lawyers see and trust: documents, matters, permissions, agent actions, and the workflows that tie them together. At a high level, we are building a Cursor-like environment for legal work, where lawyers collaborate with agents that can search, reason, and act on documents, while remaining auditable, reversible, and correct. The backend defines what is possible here, and what is safe. This is a product-first backend engineering role. To succeed, you’ll need to understand the full product surface and agent behavior, so you can design systems that evolve quickly without breaking under real-world usage.

Requirements

Ship production backend systems with high ownership and follow them through when they break.
Design data models and APIs that evolve quickly without constant rewrites.
Are comfortable building in Python across application logic, data engineering, and light infrastructure work.
Can translate ambiguous product goals into reliable systems that real users depend on.
Are excited to build the backend foundations that enable powerful product and agent workflows.

Responsibilities

Design and evolve the APIs that power the lawyer dashboard: matters, documents, chats, permissions, and email integration, so legal work stays coherent across tools, collaborators, and time.
Define and maintain data structures that support evolving product and agent workflows, including document state, provenance, permissions, and history. You’ll think carefully about boundaries, migrations, and long-term extensibility.
Build the primitives that let agents safely operate in the system: scoped permissions, state transitions, execution boundaries, and backend objects that unlock new tools and workflows without sacrificing control.
Own backend systems in production. Contribute to deployments, observability, performance, and cost awareness, while keeping the focus on product reliability rather than infrastructure for its own sake.