Founding CTO, AI Legal Tech (SF Bay Area)

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, * Level 2 - Take-Home or Live Build Exercise
• Level 3 - In-Person Co-Founder Day (half day, SF)
• Reference Checks + Offer

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Legal, Sales, Startup, Legal, Case Management, Financial Disclosure, Family Law, Operating Systems, Artificial Intelligence (AI), * 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 01 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

• 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 01 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

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., 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.