Founding AI Engineer – Phaselab

Phaselaw; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Phaselaw is looking for a Founding AI Engineer to help shape and scale its innovative product for the legal industry. This high-impact role involves close collaboration with the CTO and leadership team to deliver outstanding features and enhance performance. Join us to be part of a dynamic and diverse team committed to transforming tech in eDiscovery with cutting-edge solutions.

Benefits

Equity options

High impact role

Collaborative culture

Growth opportunities

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in backend development, ideally with startups.
• Strong expertise in a server-side programming language like Python, Java, or Golang.
• Knowledge of deploying to cloud platforms and familiarity with container orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Co-own the AI roadmap alongside the CTO.
• Ship major product improvements and updates regularly.
• Collaborate closely with product and technical leadership.

Skills

Backend development

Python

Java

Golang

NLP techniques

Large language models

SQL

NoSQL

Docker

Kubernetes

Tools

FastAPI

SQLAlchemy

AWS

GCP

Terraform

Job description

Founding AI Engineer – Phaselab

Location: San Francisco

Type: Full-time

Salary: Competitive, with equity options

About Phaselab

Phaselab is rebuilding the legacy eDiscovery industry from the ground up, empowering in-house legal teams with tools for document production that bypass the existing services-heavy approach. We're Seed stage but are already working with Fortune 500 companies and are scaling rapidly.

The Role

We’re looking for an AI Engineer to help us build and scale our core product. You’ll work closely with the CTO, Product Engineer, and Head of Product to ship impactful features and improve performance across the stack. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role where you’ll directly shape the future of Phaselab’s technology.

What You’ll Do

First Week

• Get onboarded, set up your dev environment, and dive into our systems.

• Ship a small update or bug fix to get familiar with the codebase.

• Use the product to understand how it works and identify areas for improvement.

First Month

• Participate in code reviews, architectural discussions, and technical documentation.

• Ship two major features.

By 90 Days

• Co-own the AI roadmap alongside the CTO.

• Bring major improvements to AI classification system performance through testing and fine-tuning different models.

• Ship product updates daily/weekly with a strong focus on quality.

• Ensure dependencies are consistently up to date.

• Collaborate closely with the Head of Product, CTO, and Product Engineer to shape the future of the product.

What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years of experience in backend development, ideally with startups or fast-moving teams.

• Strong expertise in a similar server-side programming language like Python, Java, Golang, etc.

• Proficiency with frameworks like FastAPI, Temporal, SQLAlchemy for backend/API development.

• Knowledge of NLP techniques and libraries (NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers).

• Experience with large language models (LLMs) and their application to document analysis.

• Experience with database systems (SQL, NoSQL, vector store like Pinecone).

• Familiarity deploying to cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, etc.)

• Familiarity with container orchestration systems (Docker, Kubernetes, Argo) and IaC frameworks like Terraform.

• A bias for action: You ship fast and iterate based on feedback.

• Strong product sense: You think beyond the code and care about delivering an exceptional user experience.

Why Join Us?

• Impact: Your work will directly shape the product and the future of the company.

• Growth: High ownership, deep collaboration with company and technical leadership.

• Speed: We move fast, ship often, and value autonomy.

• Culture: Our team is kind, collaborative, inquisitive, and inclusive – and we want to keep it that way. We have high standards for quality and ethics, and help each other learn in order to reach our objectives. We think technology is best built by teams with a diversity of background, thought, and experience.

Every team member is a human first, and we strive to create a culture and environment that supports your career goals and respects all of the hats you wear in life, not just the ones that earn you a paycheck.

Our Team

We were founded in 2023 by SaaS and data experts: Josh (CEO) lead Chartbeat as CTO to $70M+ ARR and exit; David (COO and Head of Product) lead Cortico (MIT spinoff) from 0->1 as COO; Paul (CTO) ran search infrastructure at Reddit and was engineer #7 at Moat (acquired by Oracle for $850M).

Let’s build something great together!