About the Company
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
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.
The Opportunity
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.
What You'll Do
- 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
What You Bring
Must-Haves:
- 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
Key Success Drivers
- Builder-first — you ship fast, don't wait for perfect conditions, and take pride in what you launch
- Full ownership — you treat the product and team like they're yours, because they will be
- Systems thinker — you design for agentic workflows and automation, not just feature lists
- Ambiguity-tolerant — you thrive in 0→1 environments without a defined playbook
- Mission-aligned — you're genuinely excited about AI's role in transforming legal services
- Speed over perfection — you iterate fast, learn faster, and course-correct in real time
Why Join?
Compensation & Equity:
- 7-10% founder-level equity — significantly above market, reflecting a true founding relationship
- Base salary: ~$4,000/month during the pre-seed phase, with a clear normalization trigger post-seed close
- Upside is entirely equity-driven, structured for long-term wealth creation
What Makes This Rare:
- Co-founder title and seat — not a VP/Director scope with imposed constraints
- Real product traction and paying customers before you join
- Seed round in progress: $XM already signed
- Recognized by TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield and Stanford CodeX FutureLaw
- Greenfield opportunity to define the technical foundation of a category-creating company
Interviewing Process
- Intro Call
- Level 1 — Technical Deep-Dive
- Level 2 — Take-Home or Live Build Exercise
- Level 3 — In-Person Co-Founder Day (half day, SF)
- Reference Checks + Offer