Founding Principal Architect

Location: New York City strongly preferred (4 days/week in-office)
Position Type: Full-Time (Permanent)
Work Policy: Hybrid, Remote, or In-Office (U.S. only)
Start Timeline: ASAP

Work location details

NYC preferred: 4 days/week in-office

SF acceptable: 1 week/month travel to NYC

Remote: 2 weeks/month travel to NYC (more flexible after ramp-up)

Relocation Assistance: Up to $10K available for the right candidate

Compensation

Base Salary: $0 - $250,000 (varies by interview performance, level, and location)

Equity: Competitive

About
A seed-stage AI startup focused on transforming how in-house legal teams operate, building an AI platform for automating legal workflows like request triage, redlining, drafting, and Q&A.

Role summary
Hiring a Lead Founding Engineer & Architect to own system design and implementation across the full stack. Responsible for backend and infrastructure development, delivering product features end-to-end, and helping recruit and mentor early engineers. Collaborates closely with the founders to shape product direction and company culture.

Why join

• Founding opportunity to help shape product, team, and engineering culture

• Work directly with experienced, legal-focused engineering founders

• Early leadership role with potential to grow into Head of SWE or CTO

• Backed by top-tier VCs

• High ownership, high impact role

• Equity and competitive compensation package

Tech environment

• Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript

• Tools/Frameworks: Node.js, React

• Database: Postgres

• Cloud: GCP

• Focus: Building scalable, production-grade web applications

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and development of application infrastructure and integrations

• Drive backend and infrastructure work using GCP and related tools

• Build full-stack product features in collaboration with founders and legal experts

• Define and enforce engineering best practices (CI/CD, security, reviews)

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers as the team grows

• Contribute to product strategy and roadmap planning

• Make key technical decisions around scalability, performance, and reliability

Must-have qualifications

• 5-10 years of professional software engineering experience

• Experience leading end-to-end projects and/or managing developers

• Deep expertise in React, Node.js, JavaScript/TypeScript

• Proven track record designing complex application and infrastructure systems

• Familiarity with DevOps workflows

• Experience scaling production-grade web applications

• Strong ownership mindset and ability to work through ambiguity

• Excellent communication skills

Preferred qualifications

• Early-stage startup or hyper-growth experience

• Experience in legal tech or other regulated industries

• Familiarity with enterprise security/compliance (OAuth, SOC 2, GDPR)