Technical Lead (Legal AI Platform)

About Us
At Datica, we are building an AI-powered LegalTech platform that uses Large Language Models, AI Agents, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation to transform legal research, document analysis, drafting, and other legal workflows.

Our platform helps individuals, lawyers, and businesses understand legal information, work with legal documents, and complete complex legal tasks more efficiently.

We are looking for a hands-on Technical Lead to own Datica’s technical architecture, lead the engineering team, and help take the product from MVP to a secure and scalable production platform.

This role is ideal for an experienced Python engineer who combines strong software architecture skills with practical execution, technical leadership, and an interest in building production-grade AI products.

Responsibilities

• Own Datica’s technical architecture and engineering roadmap.
• Design scalable backend services, APIs, databases, and system integrations.
• Build and maintain production-grade AI-powered backend systems.
• Collaborate with AI engineers to integrate LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agent-based workflows.
• Make architectural decisions concerning scalability, reliability, security, performance, and maintainability.
• Remain hands-on in development and contribute directly to critical parts of the codebase.
• Review code and establish engineering standards and best practices.
• Mentor backend, frontend, and AI engineering team members.
• Break product requirements into clear technical plans and implementation priorities.
• Own deployment pipelines, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, and production reliability.
• Improve testing, documentation, observability, and development processes.
• Identify and address technical debt, security risks, and performance bottlenecks.
• Evaluate technical tools, frameworks, and vendors based on product needs rather than trends.
• Work closely with the founder, product designer, legal experts, and engineering team on product strategy and technical decisions.
• Help build and grow Datica’s engineering function over time.

Requirements

• At least 6 years of professional Python development experience.
• Strong experience with FastAPI, Django, or similar Python backend frameworks.
• Excellent knowledge of PostgreSQL, database design, and query optimization.
• Strong experience with Redis and caching or background-processing patterns.
• Experience designing scalable SaaS or cloud-based application architectures.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining REST APIs.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, design patterns, and distributed systems.
• Experience with Docker and CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with AWS, Azure, GCP, or another major cloud platform.
• Experience deploying, operating, and monitoring production systems.
• Experience integrating LLM APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini.
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, application security, testing, and performance.
• Experience reviewing code and mentoring engineers.
• Ability to translate product requirements into practical technical solutions.
• Strong communication, leadership, and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work independently and take ownership in a fast-moving startup environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience with LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar AI orchestration frameworks.
• Experience building RAG systems and document-processing pipelines.
• Familiarity with vector databases such as Qdrant, Pinecone, or pgvector.
• Experience designing and operating AI agents and multi-step LLM workflows.
• Familiarity with MCP and tool-based AI integrations.
• Experience with Kubernetes or container orchestration.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, message queues, and background workers.
• Familiarity with Celery, RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar technologies.
• Experience with Elasticsearch or other search infrastructure.
• Understanding of LLM evaluation, observability, prompt versioning, and AI-system reliability.
• Experience building document-heavy SaaS, LegalTech, FinTech, or enterprise software.
• Experience helping build or scale an engineering team.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted development tools while maintaining security, code quality, and engineering judgment.

The Person We Are Looking For

• You are an experienced engineer who still enjoys building software directly.
• You are comfortable moving between architecture, coding, code review, infrastructure, debugging, mentoring, and product discussions. You can make pragmatic technical decisions without overengineering, while ensuring that the foundations of the product remain secure and scalable.
• You communicate technical trade-offs clearly and can work effectively with both technical and non-technical team members.
• You take responsibility for the reliability and quality of the overall system—not only the code you personally write.
• This role is not suitable for someone who wants a management-only position or prefers to delegate all hands-on engineering work.

What Success Looks Like
In the first few months, you will be expected to:

• Develop a deep understanding of Datica’s product, codebase, AI systems, and technical priorities.
• Review the existing architecture and identify critical risks, bottlenecks, and technical debt. Establish a clear and practical engineering roadmap.
• Improve the structure, reliability, security, and maintainability of the backend platform.
• Strengthen testing, code-review, deployment, and monitoring processes.
• Improve the integration between backend systems, AI services, and frontend applications.
• Establish clear engineering standards and development practices.
• Support and mentor the existing engineering team.
• Deliver critical product features while improving the technical foundations of the platform.
• Prepare Datica’s infrastructure and architecture for increasing users, documents, AI workloads, and product complexity.

Tech Stack
Python • FastAPI • PostgreSQL • Redis • Docker • GitHub Actions • LangGraph • OpenAI • Qdrant • AWS

What We Offer

• Work on a cutting-edge AI and LegalTech product.
• Opportunity to shape the technical direction of the company from an early stage.
• Meaningful ownership over architecture, infrastructure, engineering practices, and technical hiring.
• Direct collaboration with the founder, product team, legal experts, and AI engineers.
• Opportunity to take a product from MVP to scale.
• Ability to influence both product strategy and technical decisions.
• Collaborative, product-driven, and engineering-focused culture.
• Flexible working hours.
• Competitive salary based on experience.
• Strong professional growth as Datica’s product and engineering organization expand.