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# Founding CTO, AI Legal Tech (SF Bay Area)

- **Company:** LAVENDER, INC.
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Experienced
- **Salary:** $48,000
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** LangGraph Framework, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Web Services, Software as a Service, Cloud Computing, Python (Programming Language), Node.Js, OpenAI, Software Engineering, AI Infrastructure, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Large Language Models, Backend, Agentic-AI, Kubernetes, Production Code, Claude
- **Published:** October 27, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.careerbuilder.com/job-details/founding-cto-ai-legal-tech-sf-bay-area-san-francisco-ca--b08defd5-43f9-41cd-b7a6-6ce7c573efd5

## About the Role

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

## Description

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