Lead Software Engineer

Relativity ODA LLC; United States; Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Relativity ODA LLC is seeking an experienced Senior Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate cloud-native services at scale. You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver AI-powered legal data solutions across a multi-tenant cloud platform.

You will own platform capabilities, drive reliability, and work in a hybrid/remote environment with a focus on scalable architectures, security, and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• 7+ years designing, building, and operating cloud-native systems.
• Ability to set technical direction and lead teams.
• Hands-on experience designing and building distributed, multi-tenant systems.
• Ownership of CI/CD, observability, and service reliability.
• Strong product and systems thinking; balance speed with sustainability.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills.
• Hands-on Kubernetes production experience (cluster lifecycle, scheduling, IaC).
• Experience guiding UI, architecture or data platform design.
• 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 distributed organizations.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and operation of distributed, scalable cloud services.
• Provide technical direction across frontend, backend, and data layers.
• Collaborate daily with a diverse group of teammates and product partners to solve problems and build AI-powered legal data solutions.
• Mentor engineers and lead through technical expertise and collaboration.
• Establish and evolve engineering standards through design reviews, patterns, and best practices.
• Align team execution with product strategy and delivery commitments.
• Lead service ownership including on-call, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Own delivery of platform capabilities across cluster lifecycle, workload scheduling, and infrastructure automation.
• Partner with consuming engineering teams to onboard workloads onto the platform.
• Drive platform efficiency and balance reliability targets with compute cost.

Skills

Cloud-native design

Technical leadership

Kubernetes production

Distributed systems

CI/CD & observability

Multi-tenant security

Communication & collaboration

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.

Dep