The Role We are hiring for an exciting client with offices in the UK and Dubai. They are hiring their first dedicated software engineer to build out the legal technology that will define how they operate and what they offer our clients. You will be the engineer in the room. Not one of several, the one. You will work directly with the COO (technical, ex-founder, currently doing the building) on internal tooling, AI-driven products, and soon client-facing legal tech.
This is a senior role with founding-engineer characteristics. The expectation is that you can take a sketch of an idea, scope it, build it, ship it, and document it without anyone holding your hand. Over time, as the work grows, you will likely build and lead a small team. If you want to be the person who shapes a legal tech stack from a clean slate, in a firm that genuinely takes technology seriously, this is unusually fertile ground.
About the Client The Company is a fast-growing London and Dubai based law firm working with ambitious companies as they scale. They partner closely with founders and leadership teams, acting as an extension of their business and supporting them through everything from hiring and fundraising to expansion and day-to-day legal challenges. They’ve supported over 700 high-growth companies across a range of industries, giving their team the opportunity to work on a wide variety of interesting, fast-moving projects. They’re fully aware of where the future lies, and how today’s technology can augment, accelerate and improve what they do for clients. They have an ambitious plan for building the future of legal tech.
What you will be doing Designing, building and shipping internal tools and client-facing products across the full stack Extending and operating their internal AI platform (currently Open WebUI, LiteLLM, Caddy and internally developed applications running in Docker on a hardened Ubuntu VPS, fronting a mix of LLM providers with MCP integrations to Slack, document services, and more) Building AI-native features: agents, RAG pipelines, document automation, structured-output workflows, evaluation harnesses, dashboards … Owning deployment, observability, backups, and the security posture of what you ship, within our SRA-mandated data residency, retention and backup regimes Writing the specs you will then build from, and writing them well enough that someone else could pick them up. Building on specs produced by the team. Reviewing your own work rigorously, including (and especially) the parts produced with AI assistance Collaborating with lawyers and operations to translate fuzzy legal-domain problems into clean software Bringing a technical voice to the company, advocating for tech and encouraging all of us to embrace and celebrate a tech-based future
What we are looking for: Core engineering Around 5+ years of professional full-stack experience. We are flexible on years for the demonstrably excellent. We are not flexible on the bar Strong backend skills in Node.js (TypeScript) and/or Python. Ideally both, or a clear willingness to be fluent in both Comfortable with at least one modern frontend framework. We are agnostic on which (React/Next.js, SvelteKit, Vue, take your pick), but you should have opinions and be able to defend them Solid relational database skills (Postgres preferred). Comfortable designing schemas, writing non-trivial queries, and reasoning about performance Fluent with Git, branching strategies, code review, and the boring-but-essential hygiene of shipping software safely Comfortable on the command line using CLI and TUI tools, bash, package management, etc. Secure-coding instincts. You think about authn/authz, input validation, secrets handling, prompt injection, and supply-chain risk by default, not as an afterthought
DevOps and infrastructure Comfortable operating a Linux server (Ubuntu, in our case). Not a dedicated SRE, but able to manage a Dockerised stack, debug a misbehaving container, configure a reverse proxy, rotate a certificate, and read logs without panic. Familiarity with at least one cloud provider (we use AWS, Azure, GCP and supporting services in eu-west-1 and 2) An understanding that infrastructure decisions in a regulated firm are also compliance decisions
AI fluency Practical experience building with LLMs: APIs, prompting, structured outputs, tool use, RAG, and the trade-offs between them Working knowledge of the current AI tooling landscape (MCP, agentic frameworks, evals) Heavy, expert use of AI-assisted coding tools, ideally Claude Code or similar agentic coding setups. We expect you to lean on these tools daily, while remaining a strong manual developer who can read, audit, and rewrite anything they produce. Knowing when to trust the AI and when not to is the skill.
Compliance awareness Comfortable working inside a regulated environment. We are SRA-regulated and sometimes FCA-regulated. You don’t need to be a compliance expert, but you do need to take data protection, confidentiality, audit trails, and data residency seriously, and build accordingly
Working style High autonomy. You will not have a scrum master, a tech lead, or a product manager assigning you tickets. You will need to structure your own week, prioritise sensibly, collaborate constantly and tell us when something is off track Strong, English language written communication. You can write a spec, a design doc, an incident note or a clear Slack message Disciplined documentor. Specs, code, and outcomes. Future-you, current and future-colleagues will thank present-you Open, collaborative, low ego. You’ll work closely with lawyers and operations people who are sharp but not technical. Patience and clarity matter.
Nice to have Prior experience as a founding engineer, early hire, or solo developer in a small company Experience with legal tech, regtech, or other regulated-industry software Background contributing to open source, side projects, a tech blog, or active engagement in the AI/dev community. Anything that suggests you actually like this stuff outside of working hours. Knowledge of the broader AI landscape, OSS projects like Ollama and models beyond the usual suspects. Maybe experience designing and running LLM evaluation harnesses Familiarity with document-processing pipelines (we work with .docx heavily) Comfort with technical leadership: code review, mentoring, scoping work for others
Who you are likely to be Someone who has worked in a small, fast-moving company or team before and prefers it to a slow corporate Someone who is more excited by a clean slate and a problem worth solving than by a polished development process Less impressed by ten years at a FAANG than by three years of shipping things people actually used Opinionated, but the kind of opinionated that listens Genuinely curious about AI, not just performatively so Able to work remotely and maintain your energy from afar
What we offer A senior, founding-engineer-level role with real scope, real autonomy, and a path to leading a team Direct working relationship with the COO (technical), CEO and SLT The chance to build legal tech from a clean slate at a firm that has actually committed to it Competitive salary, calibrated to experience Flexible working Other benefits TBD
Apply here: https://forms.gle/gFk6oQYEsD27bzSy5
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