Founding Engineer, AI (Path to Co-Founder/CTO)

EBADAT; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity stake

Path to Co-founder/CTO

On-site in Houston

Job summary

EBADAT, a Houston-based corporate law firm, is building AI tools for transactional work and hiring its first engineer as co-founder/CTO. You will be the primary technical lead and work directly with the founder to design and ship platforms that will serve as the firm's first users and design partner.

The role emphasizes ownership, end-to-end development, and rapid iteration with real users who understand the domain.

Qualifications

• Production experience building LLM applications with retrieval, agents, evaluation, and structured output.
• Strong full-stack engineering skills including TypeScript and/or Python, cloud, databases, authentication, and security.
• Proven track record taking a product from zero to one as a founder, first engineer, or solo project with real users.
• Rigor about correctness due to confidential and privileged material.

Responsibilities

• Build AI tools for transactional legal work used by the firm.
• Own the architecture, implementation, and deployment of the platform with minimal to no team support.

Skills

LLM apps

Full-stack engineering

Founder experience

Output accuracy

Job description

Legal experience is not required; domain training and feedback is provided.

About EBADAT

EBADAT is a corporate law firm in advising founders, fund managers, and acquirers on mergers and acquisitions, venture and growth financing, fund formation, and sponsor-led transactions. The firm is ranked by Chambers and Legal 500 for middle-market M&A, fund formation, and venture financings, with clients across technology, energy, sports, consumer, and financial services.

The role

EBADAT is building AI tools for transactional legal work and hiring the first engineer to build them. You will be the only engineer for a meaningful period, working directly with the firm's founder, with the firm itself as your first user and design partner. We have previously built with consultants MVP versions of certain platforms and wish to hyper charge our development.

What you'll build

We have experience advising on billions in transactions and our Chambers-ranked corporate practice actively works on fund formation, venture financing, and M&A as is on the forefront of legal work.

That experience functions as the product specification. We have identify with precision platforms and tools to build that actually alleviate real problems and are necessary for practice of law.

The advantage of building here is the feedback loop. Your users are in the building, they work on these documents every day, and they have the domain expertise to tell you precisely when a model is wrong rather than merely unhelpful. Client material remains subject to the firm's confidentiality obligations, and designing within those constraints is part of the engineering problem.

Co-founder/CTO Role

To be clear about the intent. this search is for a co-founder and CTO, not a long-term individual contributor or pure employee. That title is not being offered at the outset. The role begins as a full-time salaried engineering position with a defined path to be earned. If the work and the working relationship hold up over the first several months, the title and the ownership follow.

Market

The market nonetheless remains fragmented. Horizontal legal AI products, Harvey, Legora, Spellbook, provide drafting and research assistance to lawyers but do not own the transaction outcome. Investor onboarding platforms such as Anduin and Passthrough address subscription workflows without providing fund counsel. Platforms developed inside large firms generally remain captive to those firms. No participant currently occupies the intersection of substantive fund formation depth and externally commercializable software.

The underlying volume is substantial and recurring: 54,392 private funds reported on Form PF, $26.9 trillion in gross assets, and 34,553 initial Regulation D filings in the most recent full year. Hundreds of billions in M&A work. All built off trust and relationships not on AI first software.

What we're looking for

• Demonstrated production experience building LLM applications — retrieval, agents, evaluation, structured output, and the failure modes that come with them. Prototypes and demos are not the bar.
• Strong full-stack engineering. TypeScript and/or Python, cloud infrastructure, databases, authentication, security. You can take a system from concept to production without a team behind you.
• A track record of taking a product from zero to one alone or nearly alone — as a founder, a first engineer, or on a project of your own that reached real users.
• Rigor about correctness. We work with confidential and privileged material, where an incorrect output carries real consequences.
• Based in Houston and able to work on-site most days.
• Legal experience is not required; domain training and feedback is provided.

Compensation

• Base salary, discussed on the first call.
• Meaningful equity in the technology company. Four-year vesting with a one-year cliff; percentage negotiated based on scope of responsibility and experience level.
• Clear bath to Co-founder and CTO.
• Funded by an operating, profitable law firm rather than venture capital — no burn clock on the first release.
• Full authority over technical decisions, including stack, architecture, and future hirings.