Lead Software Engineer

Relativity; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 224,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Home office stipend

Equity program

DTO (Discretionary Time Off)

Job summary

Relativity is a leading legal data intelligence company building an AI-powered cloud platform RelativityOne. Engineers on our Shared Compute Infrastructure team develop and operate Kubernetes-based services across a global fleet, focusing on reliability, scale, and cost efficiency.

This role leads platform ownership and collaboration with diverse engineering teams. The position emphasizes guiding architecture, driving platform efficiency, and delivering scalable AI-powered legal data solutions,

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience designing, building and operating cloud-native systems.
• Proven ability to set technical direction and lead teams effectively.
• Hands-on experience designing and building distributed, multi-tenant systems.
• Ownership of CI/CD, observability, and service reliability.
• Strong product and systems thinking, balancing delivery speed with long-term sustainability.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and operation of distributed, scalable, secure full-stack cloud services that process petabytes of data weekly.
• Provide clear technical direction across frontend, backend, and data layers.
• Collaborate daily with teammates and product partners to solve problems and build AI-powered legal data solutions at massive scale.
• Mentor engineers and lead through technical expertise and collaboration.
• Establish and evolve engineering standards through design reviews, patterns, and coaching.
• Align team execution with product strategy and delivery commitments; remove technical friction.
• Lead service ownership across the team, driving reliability, on-call practices, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Own delivery of platform capabilities across cluster lifecycle, workload scheduling, and infrastructure automation.
• Partner with consuming teams to onboard workloads onto the platform with scalable, repeatable processes.

Skills

Cloud-native design

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Kubernetes in production

CI/CD ownership

Tools

Azure AKS

CI/CD tooling

Terraform / IaC

Job description

Posting Type

Hybrid/Remote

Job Overview

Who We Are

Relativity is a leading legal data intelligence company building technology that helps users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it with confidence. Our AI-powered cloud platform, RelativityOne, transforms massive volumes of complex information into actionable insights for litigation, investigations, regulatory inquiries, data breach responses, and other high-stakes legal work where accuracy and trust are crucial.

The world's largest law firms, corporations and government agencies rely on Relativity's legal AI software to securely surface and manage the most relevant and impactful information in their matters. Beyond our commercial impact, we're deeply committed to expanding access to technology for academic institutions through Relativity Academic and supporting pro bono legal work through Justice for Change.

What We Do

At Relativity, engineers don't just write code, they harness AI tools to architect, optimize, and deliver scalable software faster and shape the future of legal technology. They shape how industries uncover critical insights, ensure compliance, advance access to justice and continuously evolve our platform using the latest technologies, including cloud-native architectures, AI capabilities, and modern developer tooling. Our AI powers privacy programs, identifies confidential information, and detects language indicating misconduct. We're reimagining how legal professionals uncover truth at scale, and engineering is at the heart of that transformation.

The Shared Compute Infrastructure team builds and operates the Kubernetes platform that every RelativityOne service runs on: a global fleet of AKS clusters spanning commercial and government clouds, together with the networking, routing, and extensibility layers beneath them. We own the platform's reliability, scale, and cost efficiency end to end, from cluster lifecycle automation to the policy and scheduling controls that keep thousands of tenant workloads healthy.

If you're passionate about solving hard problems, designing for scale, and building tools that matter, while working in a culture that values transparency, innovation, and shared success, Relativity offers the opportunity to make a measurable difference in the marketplace.

Job Description and Requirements

What You'll Do

• Lead the design, development, and operation of distributed, scalable, secure full-stack cloud services that process petabytes of data weekly, contributing directly to implementation and guiding your team's execution.
• Provide clear technical direction across frontend, backend, and data layers, collaborating with team, staff, and principal engineers on system design.
• Collaborate daily with a diverse group of teammates and product partners to solve problems, achieve shared goals, and build AI-powered legal data solutions that operate at massive scale.
• Mentor engineers and lead through technical expertise, collaboration, and sound engineering judgment.
• Establish and evolve engineering standards through design and code reviews, patterns, best practices, and coaching.
• Align team execution with product strategy and delivery commitments, identifying and removing technical friction.
• Lead service ownership across the team by driving reliability efforts, on-call practices, incident response, resolution, and root cause analysis.
• Own delivery of platform capabilities across cluster lifecycle, workload scheduling, and infrastructure automation, applying and enforcing cloud-native architecture standards for the services your team owns.
• Partner with consuming engineering teams to onboard their workloads onto the platform, translating their reliability and scale requirements into platform capabilities rather than one-off exceptions.
• Drive platform efficiency and capacity outcomes for your team's surface area, balancing reliability targets against compute cost.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 7+ years of experience designing, building and operating cloud-native systems.
• Proven ability to set technical direction and lead teams effectively.
• Hands-on experience designing and building distributed, multi-tenant systems.
• Ownership of CI/CD, observability, and service reliability.
• Strong product and systems thinking, balancing delivery speed with long-term sustainability.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and technical leadership skills.
• Hands-on experience running Kubernetes in production, including cluster lifecycle, workload scheduling, and infrastructure as code.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud networking, and security in a multi-tenant environment.

Preferred

• Experience guiding UI, architecture or data platform design.
• Prior people-lead or technical-lead experience.
• Experience in regulated or large-scale environments.
• Familiarity with AI-development tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor or Claude Code.
• Experience working in global or highly distributed organizations.
• Depth in Azure and AKS.
• Experience operating a multi-cluster fleet across regions or cloud boundaries, such as commercial and government environments.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and automation tooling.

Why We Could Be A Great Fit

• Impactful Mission: Organize Data, Discover the Truth and Act on It. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading law firms managing high-stakes matters on our platform.
• Growth Path: Engineers gain exposure across the stack, from distributed systems to AI-enabled workflows, accelerating career growth.
• Engineering Culture: Continuous delivery, strong observability, and end-to-end ownership.
• Inclusive Environment: Diverse backgrounds and perspectives make us stronger.
• Community Impact: Volunteer opportunities and company-sponsored charitable programs.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salary, health and retirement programs, wellness resources, discretionary time off (DTO), parental leave for primary and secondary caregivers, two annual company breaks, home office stipend, and an equity program.

Relativity is committed to competitive, fair, and equitable compensation practices.

This position is eligible for total compensation which includes a competitive base salary, an annual performance bonus, and long-term incentives.

The expected salary range for this role is between following values:

$150,000 and $224,000

The final offered salary will be based on several factors, including but not limited to the candidate's depth of experience, skill set, qualifications, and internal pay equity. Hiring at the top end of the range would not be typical, to allow for future meaningful salary growth in this position.

Required Skills: Documentations, Innovation, Leadership, Problem Solving, Process Improvements, Project Management, Quality Assurance (QA), Risk Management, Technical Knowledge, Troubleshooting