Founding Engineer
$250kDavid Joseph & Company
Job Description
Job Description
Founding Engineer
San Francisco, CA · On-site · Full-time
Compensation: $250,000 + 10% equity
Our client is an early-stage, bootstrapped legal technology company reinventing how people find the right lawyer. Their attorneys provide free guidance to anyone seeking legal help, use AI to diagnose exactly what each person needs, and connect them with the right firm, earning revenue by sharing in the fees those referrals generate. Their wedge is a conversational voice AI intake product that they give to other law firms for free: when a caller's needs fall outside what a firm handles, the caller is transferred to our client in real time. The product is already live and working, attorneys across many practice areas have signed on, and early partner-firm outreach is converting well.
Founded 2026 · 1-10 people · Industry: Legal Tech
The RoleThis is the company's first engineering hire, reporting directly to the Founder. You will take a working, founder-built voice AI intake product from prototype to production-grade reliability, own the platform that powers referrals between the company and its partner firms, and personally deploy the product into those firms. Because these are sensitive, high-stakes conversations with people in legal distress, reliability, privacy, and security are the core engineering problems from day one, not afterthoughts.
What you'll be doing
- Take the conversational voice AI intake product from prototype to production-grade reliability across live calls and an embedded web form
- Own privacy and security hardening for sensitive interactions, plus the infrastructure that handles client funds
- Build and own the referral platform connecting partner firms, in-house attorneys, and referred clients
- Install and integrate the product at partner firms, including their existing phone systems and IVR menus (primarily remote, with occasional on-site work)
- Build additional product workflows, iterating directly on feedback from firms in the network
Tech stack: Not specified.
Requirements- At least 4 years of professional software engineering experience, with recent hands-on work in applied AI at a strong company
- A track record of taking a prototype to production-grade reliability in systems where failures reach real users, including privacy and security hardening
- Full-stack ability to build and iterate a customer-facing platform end-to-end, including workflows that touch sensitive client funds
- Comfortable with client-facing delivery: going into partner firms to install and integrate the product against their existing telephony setups
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or willing to relocate, in office at least 4 days a week, and comfortable working beyond a standard 9-5
- Hands-on experience with voice AI or conversational voice agents
- Experience in healthcare AI, particularly clinical intake, scribing, or triage
- Experience in legal AI
- Telephony and IVR integration experience
- Applied AI experience at a recognized company with genuine production ownership rather than prototype-only work
- A stretch of sustained tenure at a single company
- First engineering hire and a true founding seat, with 10% equity and end-to-end ownership of the core product
- A direct line to the Founder and real influence over technical direction from day one
- A live product with early traction and a genuinely novel business model
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Work policy: On-site, at least 4 days/week; relocation support for the right candidate
- Compensation: $250,000 + 10% equity
- Visa sponsorship: Not available
- Employment type: Full-time
Vacancy posted 5 days ago
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