Founding AI Product Engineer

Patexia Inc.; Los Angeles, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

LexDana, based in Century City, Los Angeles, seeks an engineer who can fuse product thinking with AI-native software development to transform legal data processing. You will work closely with the founder and customers to shape the product and engineering culture as one of the first technical hires.

You’ll own problems from idea to production, building scalable services and AI-powered tooling. This role blends customer interaction, architecture, SQL optimization, and production code in a

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building production systems.
• AI-native development mindset—use AI daily to design, build, debug, and improve software.
• Excellent product instincts, and the habit of identifying the customer problem before proposing a solution.
• Comfort working without detailed specifications.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with large datasets.
• Experience designing scalable systems and debugging complex production environments.
• Comfort working across frontend, backend, infrastructure, databases, and APIs.

Responsibilities

• Meet directly with customers to understand their workflows and uncover opportunities.
• Design and build AI-native applications.
• Use AI as your primary engineering tool to dramatically accelerate development.
• Build scalable backend services and APIs.
• Design systems that process and analyze millions of records.
• Develop entity resolution and identity matching across complex datasets.
• Design efficient data models and optimize large-scale SQL workloads.
• Debug production issues across the full stack, from infrastructure to application code.
• Collaborate with the founder on product strategy, technical architecture, and long-term vision.
• Help establish engineering best practices and build the engineering culture as we grow.

Skills

Production systems

AI-native development

Product instincts

SQL skills

Scalable systems

Frontend / Backend / APIs

Job description

LexDana · Century City, Los Angeles · Full-time · On-site 3–4 days/week

Build the Future of Legal Intelligence

This isn't a traditional software engineering role. It isn't an AI research role. And it isn't a role where you'll spend your days implementing tickets someone else wrote.

We're looking for someone who can identify customer problems, design products people genuinely need, and use AI to build them faster than a traditional engineering team ever could. You'll work directly with the founder, customers, and early design partners to shape both the product and the engineering culture of LexDana.

If you're happiest turning ambiguous ideas into production software, read on.

About LexDana

LexDana is building the legal memory layer for patent disputes.

Every patent dispute has a history. Today, every legal team reconstructs that history from scratch — reading thousands of pages across prosecution, PTAB, ITC, district court, and the Federal Circuit. We're changing that.

LexDana transforms millions of pages of legal records into a structured, cite-backed semantic memory layer that professionals can query, analyze, and trust. Every answer is grounded in the underlying record, never generated from thin air.

The platform is built on more than 15 years of structured patent and litigation data developed by the team behind the Patexia rankings, which are used widely across the patent industry. LexDana is currently incubated within Patexia, but we're building it as an independent company with its own product, engineering culture, and long-term vision.

This is a chance to be one of the first technical hires and help define what that company becomes.

The Opportunity

We're not looking for someone who simply writes code. We're looking for someone who understands customers, spots valuable opportunities, designs great products, and then builds them.

The ideal candidate combines product thinking, software engineering, AI-native development, data engineering, and systems thinking — and is equally comfortable meeting with a customer, whiteboarding a product idea, designing system architecture, optimizing a SQL query, debugging cloud infrastructure, and reading production logs.

You’ll own problems from idea to production.

What You’ll Do

• Meet directly with customers to understand their workflows and uncover opportunities
• Design and build AI-native applications
• Use AI as your primary engineering tool to dramatically accelerate development
• Build scalable backend services and APIs
• Design systems that process and analyze millions of records
• Develop entity resolution and identity matching across complex datasets
• Design efficient data models and optimize large-scale SQL workloads
• Debug production issues across the full stack, from infrastructure to application code
• Collaborate with the founder on product strategy, technical architecture, and long-term vision
• Help establish engineering best practices and build the engineering culture as we grow

What We’re Looking For

Required

• Strong software engineering experience building production systems
• An AI-native development mindset — you use AI every day to design, build, debug, and improve software
• Excellent product instincts, and the habit of identifying the customer problem before proposing a solution
• Comfort working without detailed specifications
• Strong SQL skills and experience with large datasets
• Experience designing scalable systems and debugging complex production environments
• Comfort working across frontend, backend, infrastructure, databases, and APIs

Strongly preferred — experience with several of the following:

• Data & retrieval: entity resolution, record linkage, identity matching, information retrieval, search systems, knowledge graphs

You'll Thrive Here If You...

• Think like a founder and take ownership without waiting for permission
• Care deeply about solving customer problems, and love building products rather than features
• Move quickly while holding a high bar
• Switch easily between customer conversations, architecture discussions, SQL optimization, cloud infrastructure, and production code
• Use AI to amplify your engineering while keeping a deep understanding of the systems you build
• Ask "What should we build?" before "How should we build it?"

This Might Not Be the Right Fit If...

• You use AI as an occasional coding assistant rather than as the center of how you work
• You specialize deeply in one layer of the stack and prefer to stay there
• You prefer predictable work over ambiguity and rapid iteration
• You're looking for a fully remote role

Location

This role is based in Century City, Los Angeles. The role is hybrid and we work together in the office 3 to 4 days per week — our best ideas come out of whiteboard sessions, customer conversations, and fast iteration in the same room.

This is not a remote position. You should already live within commuting distance of Century City, or be willing to relocate before joining.

Why Join

You'll be joining at the beginning of something ambitious. You'll work directly with the founder, influence the roadmap, help shape the engineering culture, and build technology that can change how patent professionals work with legal history. You'll also earn meaningful equity and help build an independent company from its earliest days.

Compensation: [base salary range] plus meaningful early-stage equity.

We care far more about your ability to build great products than about checking every box above. If you've built exceptional software, think deeply about users, and AI has fundamentally changed how you develop, we'd encourage you to apply even if your background doesn't perfectly match every technology listed.