Product Engineer - Frontend Leaning

Alma•Bay Area, CA

16h•$150,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

Alma is an AI-native law firm that combines AI with an exceptional legal team to deliver fast, transparent, and high-touch legal services. We are focused on simplifying complex immigration processes for companies and individuals. We are backed by leading VCs and are looking for a Product Engineer who is backend-leaning and AI-native. This role involves owning features end-to-end, from database schema to the React component, and working directly with the founding team and early customers to ship a world-class AI-powered product. The ideal candidate will be deeply customer-obsessed, serving both external customers and the internal legal team. Alma believes in a modern approach where engineers who design APIs also build the UI that consumes them, emphasizing speed, quality, and collaboration. The role requires an AI-native mindset, with a preference for engineers who leverage AI tooling in their daily workflow. The company operates in a fast-paced environment with a focus on shipping and improving the codebase, rather than maintaining a pristine environment.

Requirements

Enjoy working in a fast-paced environment & wear multiple hats — including ones outside your historical comfort zone.
2+ years of backend development experience, with demonstrated willingness (or eagerness) to own frontend work. You don't need to be a CSS wizard on day one, but you need to be the kind of engineer who'll learn React deeply rather than punt it to someone else.
Experience developing products built on top of LLMs / ML.
Proficient in Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, containerization and scaling microservices.
Comfortable in (or excited to ramp on) TypeScript, React, and modern frontend tooling.
Experience building products from zero to one.
Ability to seek & find the right resources for solving open-ended problems.
Daily, hands-on use of modern coding harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent) — not as autocomplete, but as a primary way of shipping production code.
Comfortable building and consuming MCP servers to integrate internal tools, data, and workflows into your dev loop.
Strong point of view on AI-assisted code review, automated testing, and how to keep quality high when shipping at agent speed.
Located in the San Francisco Bay Area or willing to relocate.
BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

Nice To Haves

Experience working in a small startup environment (Seed or Series A).
Genuine full-stack experience — comfortable across backend, frontend, and infra.
Understand data lake / data warehouse.
Understand Transformer / Attention / GPU inference.
Experience with AWS, Supabase, LaunchDarkly & Betterstack.
Built your own MCP servers, custom agents, or internal AI dev tooling.
Published, blogged, or shared opinions about modern AI-assisted development workflows.

Responsibilities

Work closely with the founding team and early customers to build a world-class AI-powered product.
Own features end-to-end — architect the backend (server logic, databases, APIs), build the frontend that exposes them, and ship to production.
Partner with our designer and product team to translate user needs into shipped experiences — not just APIs that "the frontend team will integrate later."
Engage in the entire application lifecycle with a high bar for coding, debugging, testing, and deploying.
Operate as a force multiplier with AI tooling — use coding agents to move 5–10x faster than traditional engineers without sacrificing quality, and continuously evolve how our team builds, reviews, and tests software.