Lead Platform Engineer, API & AI Services

Role: Lead Platform Engineer, API & AI Services
Location: Remote
Duration: 6+ Months

Only W2

Role Overview
You will own the production API gateway that delivers CoCounsel - Client AI platform for legal research, contract review, and document work - to enterprise customers. The gateway is the security perimeter and request-routing layer between enterprise identity and every AI sub-service downstream: a multi-tenant, CIAM-authenticated Python/FastAPI service running on AWS. Your primary mission is to hold this platform, keep it reliable and secure, and evolve it as the enterprise customer base grows.
You will lead a pod of 3-4 engineers and work peer-to-peer with the sub-service teams whose APIs the gateway fronts. The team already builds and ships LLM-powered legal AI services - contract analysis, document review, and more - and you will be part of those design and engineering conversations from day one. The gateway is the primary responsibility; the AI services work is the other half of what the team does.
Enterprise customers are already asking how to access CoCounsel's capabilities beyond REST - as MCP servers, callable tools, and programmatic interfaces their own AI agents can invoke. Defining how a professional-grade legal AI platform exposes itself to the emerging enterprise agent ecosystem is an open design problem, and this team is positioned to own it. That work builds directly on the production gateway you'll hold.


Key Responsibilities

• Gateway Ownership Own and operate the production multi-tenant API gateway: CIAM/OIDC authentication, per-tenant routing, rate-limiting, fault isolation, and rolling deploys on AWS ECS Fargate. Maintain and evolve JWT validation - JWKS key management, claim validation, tenant identity propagation, and key rotation. Drive reliability through circuit-breaking, latency budgets, and graceful degradation.
• Security & Authentication Own the CIAM/OIDC/OAuth 2.0 integration at the gateway layer - this is the primary security perimeter for enterprise customer traffic. Implement and maintain JWT validation, tenant-scoped authorization, and API key lifecycle management.
• Pod Leadership Lead a pod of 3-4 engineers: code reviews, architectural decisions, delegating concrete pieces of work with clear ownership, and mentoring. Resolve cross-team design questions peer-to-peer. Hold a clear distinction between DEV iteration (fast, reversible, learn by breaking) and PROD discipline (coordinated, observable, controlled rollout).
• Production Engineering Maintain CI/CD pipelines and IaC (CDK or Terraform) for the gateway and its supporting infrastructure. Own AWS infrastructure - ECS Fargate task lifecycle, multi-region rollout, ElastiCache Redis for distributed state, and RDS for quota and analytics. Build and maintain observability: distributed tracing, latency dashboards, per-tenant usage metrics.
• AI Services Engineering Participate in the design and engineering of LLM-backed sub-services the team builds and operates: contract analysis pipelines, RAG architectures, agentic workflows. Contribute to decisions about how AI service results propagate across the platform - async job patterns, structured outputs, webhook delivery - and bring a platform engineer's perspective to reliability, observability, and integration.
• Enterprise AI Integration Define and build how enterprise customers access CoCounsel's capabilities beyond REST APIs. Enterprise customers are already asking for MCP servers, callable tools, and programmatic interfaces their own AI agents can invoke. This is an open design problem on a near-term roadmap - you will shape the answer, building directly on the gateway and auth infrastructure you own.

Required Skills and Experience

• Python/FastAPI in production.
• You have built and operated a FastAPI service handling real external traffic - not just internal tooling or AI-app backends.
• AWS.
• Hands-on with ECS Fargate, CloudForma