What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Software Engineer position at American Legal Technologies?
About the Company
We are a seed-stage start-up (operating in stealth as “ALT”) building a platform for on-demand, high quality, AI-assisted answers to legal questions. ALT outperforms human attorneys in answering questions about the law.
In the United States, the law is paywalled. ChatGPT, Claude, Harvey, and Legora have access to only a small fraction of U.S. legal data. To access the laws that bind us, one must pay incumbents Westlaw and LexisNexis. Through web scraping and physical digitization, we are on track to build one of the largest collections of U.S. law in the world. We are motivated by improving public access to the law. We will enable free, basic search and sell complementary, patent-pending AI functionality.
As our goal is to maximize answer quality, processing the necessary data and building the required AI infrastructure is tremendously complex. We are not building basic RAG chatbots or LLM-wrapper workflow tools. We are hiring a small team of extremely talented, motivated, intense, and interesting people to solve the most difficult and important problem in legal tech: high quality answers to legal questions.
While in stealth, ALT has secured LOIs from several of the largest law firms in the United States. ALT is well capitalized by tier-1 VCs and some of the most prominent people in the legal tech industry. Our team has deep expertise in law and AI.
We are hiring founding software engineers. All roles are full-time and in-person in NYC. Expect market-leading compensation, including meaningful equity ownership.
We are an equal opportunity employer.
Founding Software Engineers
About the Role
ALT is an early-stage start-up, which means software engineers won’t be maintaining a codebase but creating one from scratch. You’ll take end-to-end ownership of big, messy problems and turn them into simple, dependable product experiences. You’ll move fast, make consequential decisions, and see your work meaningfully improve public access to the law. You will be intimately involved in getting a fast-moving start-up off the ground. Founding engineers will have a front-row seat to watch how a start-up is built. If you are contemplating founding one day, this role will arm you with a founder’s perspective. If you are energized by ambiguity and want to build real systems from nothing, you will enjoy the unusually high leverage.
What You’ll Do
Founding software engineer responsibilities are malleable, shaped by company needs, engineer interest, and past experience. Expected priority areas include the creation of web scraping infrastructure, data processing pipelines (including sophisticated optical character recognition approaches), search algorithms, agentic AI systems, cybersecurity protections, and novel user interfaces. No founding software engineer is expected to work on all of these areas, but interest in multiple areas is desirable. In the short term, our efforts will be focused on data acquisition, processing, and standardization.
Qualifications
- You have strong engineering judgment: an ability to design efficient architectures and avoid unnecessary complexity.
- You build quality software in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible.
- You have experience with AI coding tools coupled with sufficient expertise to avoid the introduction of “AI slop.”
- You are energized by having ownership in a fast-moving startup environment: you can design and ship.
- You have a BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or equivalent experience.
- Nice-to-haves, but not necessary: interest in the law, experience with large-scale text corpora and document pipelines, and experience as a start-up founder.