Senior / Staff Software Engineer, AI Systems

Lighthouse

$150K — $180K *
Legal & Accounting
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 4+ years in production software development with expertise in backend systems and AI/ML applications.
  • Experience building systems using large language models (LLMs) beyond simple chat interfaces.
  • Ability to translate domain-specific processes and quality metrics into software functionalities.
  • Proficiency in Python and TypeScript or similar programming languages.
  • Demonstrated history of leading projects from inception to deployment and maintenance.
  • Strong understanding of workflow orchestration and asynchronous systems, including handling retries and failures.
  • Ability to independently tackle unfamiliar problems and derive workable solutions.

Responsibilities

  • Build systems that automate complex, multi-step legal workflows with appropriate human intervention.
  • Redesign task and workflow orchestration for long-running processes, dependencies, and recovery mechanisms.
  • Develop evaluation systems to assess output quality and guide improvements in software agents and models.
  • Enhance backend services, event pipelines, and scheduled job infrastructure.
  • Make agent execution processes observable for debugging and managing system quality and performance.
  • Integrate internal tools and user-facing portals, including APIs and interfaces for work supervision.

Benefits

  • Visa sponsorship available.
  • Competitive base salary and equity based on experience.
  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance.
  • 401(k) plan with a 3% company match.
  • Stipend for equipment and office needs.
  • Annual team off-site retreats in exciting locations.
  • Position based in San Francisco or New York.
Full Job Description
We're looking for a senior or staff-level software engineer to build the AI systems that help the world's best and brightest build in the U.S.

You'll own the agents and infrastructure that power complex legal workflows: drafting documents, reviewing evidence, and moving cases toward filing. This includes workflow orchestration, backend services, and evaluations that measure quality and catch regressions. You'll work directly with our legal team to understand their processes and turn early experiments into reliable production systems.

What you'll do:
  • Build agentic systems that automate complex, multi-step legal workflows, with human review and intervention at the right points.
  • Redesign our task and workflow orchestration to support long-running work, dependencies, retries, and recovery.
  • Build evaluation systems to measure output quality, catch regressions, and guide improvements to agents, prompts, and models.
  • Improve the architecture of our backend services, event pipelines, and scheduled job infrastructure.
  • Make agent execution observable, so we can understand what happened, debug failures, and manage quality, latency, and cost.
  • Connect these systems to our internal tools and applicant-facing portal, including the APIs and interfaces people need to supervise their work.


You might be a good fit if:
  • You have 4+ years shipping production software, with deep experience in backend systems and experience building AI/ML powered applications.
  • You've built with LLMs beyond a basic chat interface and thought carefully about tool use, context, evaluation, and handling unreliable outputs.
  • You can work with domain experts to turn nuanced processes and quality judgments into software behavior and meaningful evaluations.
  • You're comfortable working in Python and TypeScript, or similar languages.
  • You've led projects end to end, from ambiguous requirements through deployment and ongoing operation.
  • You have a solid understanding of workflow orchestration and asynchronous systems, including queues, events, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
  • You have high agency: you can independently research unfamiliar problems, test approaches, and drive them to a working solution.

Experience operating agents in production, building eval infrastructure, or working on complex document workflows is especially relevant. Strong engineering judgment matters more to us than experience with a particular framework.

Pay and Benefits
  • We sponsor visas, obviously.
  • Competitive base and equity, scaled with experience.
  • Competitive medical, dental, and vision benefits.
  • 401k with a 3% company match.
  • Equipment/office stipend.
  • Annual team off-site in cool places.
  • In person in San Francisco or New York.

Apply through our Careers page. If selected, we'll schedule a call to get to know you better and do a deep technical dive into the work you've chosen to highlight.

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