Lavendo partners with startups and high‑growth companies to help them hire top‑tier sales, GTM, and technical talent. This role is with one of our clients; we’ll share full details about the company and interview process as we get to know you and confirm mutual fit.

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

Founding CTO, AI Legal Tech (SF Bay Area) at Lavendo