Founding Head of Engineering

Inhouse AI

$150K — $200K *
US-AnywhereRemote in United States
Legal & Accounting
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience (3+ years in Python)
  • 5+ years in a technical leadership role managing architecture and production systems
  • Demonstrated experience hiring and managing engineers effectively
  • Proven track record in building agentic AI systems in production
  • Experience developing robust evaluation systems (e.g., LLM-as-judge)
  • Familiarity with AI-native development environments (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor)
  • Product-driven mindset, preferably from a successful startup

Responsibilities

  • Own software architecture and delivery for high-stakes AI systems
  • Design and evolve AI system features including prompting and orchestration logic
  • Develop context and retrieval systems for enhanced search and memory management
  • Implement evaluation infrastructure for rigorous testing of AI outputs
  • Collaborate closely with legal professionals to integrate workflows into AI systems
  • Stay updated with advancements in AI and legal technology
  • Lead the growth and management of the engineering team, currently three members

Benefits

  • Competitive salary with founding-level equity
  • Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
  • Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
  • Opportunity to work at the forefront of legal AI innovation
Full Job Description
Founding Head of Engineering

Location: Los Angeles > West Coast > US & Canada

Type: Full-time
About the Role

General-purpose LLMs are not reliable for high-stakes legal work. We are building expert-in-the-loop AI systems that continuously improve through lawyer feedback, strong retrieval, structured evaluation, and production-grade engineering.

We are looking for a founding Head of Engineering to take our systems to the next level. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who has built agentic AI systems in production.

You will own architecture and delivery, build and manage the engineering team, and define how AI systems are built at Inhouse. You will work directly with lawyers to translate legal workflows into reliable, production-grade AI systems.
What You'll Do
  • Own software architecture and delivery: design, deploy, and operate systems at scale
  • Design and evolve our AI systems, including:
    • prompting and orchestration logic
    • context and retrieval systems (search, integrations, memory)
    • evaluation infrastructure (LLM-as-judge, regression testing)
    • expert feedback systems (building eval sets from their natural workflow)
  • Stay on the frontier of AI and legal AI
  • Hire, manage, and grow the engineering team (currently 3 FTEs)


What We're Looking For

Required
  • 10+ years of software engineering experience (3+ years in Python)
  • 5+ years in a technical leadership role with ownership over architecture, delivery, and production systems
  • Experience hiring and managing engineers
  • Built agentic AI systems in production, including:
    • goal-directed reasoning, planning, and tool use
    • multi-agent or sub-agent architectures
    • context management and memory systems
  • Built evaluation systems (e.g. LLM-as-judge, automated evals, regression testing)
  • Worked in an AI-native development environment (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.)
  • Product mindset - ideally from a successful startup environment
  • Enough frontend or workflow UI experience to collaborate across the product stack
Compensation & Benefits
  • Competitive salary + meaningful founding-level equity
  • Fully covered health, dental, and vision
  • Unlimited PTO
  • High-impact work at the core of a rapidly growing legal AI company

Similar Jobs

More Legal & Accounting Jobs

Find similar Founding Head of Engineering jobs: