Founding CTO, AI Legal Tech (SF Bay Area)

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)