Staff Software Engineer - Strategic Agentic Surfaces

Relativity; Illinois; Hybrid; USD 174,000 - 262,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

DTO

Parental leave

Equity program

Competitive salary

Job summary

Relativity's Gavel Exec team seeks a Staff Software Engineer to own end-to-end architecture of the agent system, including dispatchers, tool interfaces, and guardrails, while guiding the evaluation strategy and release gating.

You will lead the technical roadmap across stack—live indexing, hybrid search, and grounding of playbooks—and collaborate with CTO to drive platform decisions, scale engineering, and mentor engineers while remaining hands-on.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of production software experience with recent LLM-based products.
• Proven ownership of an agentic system in production, including multi-step tool use and orchestration across components.
• Strong understanding of modern AI engineering stack: prompt/context engineering, function calling, retrieval, evaluation design, and model routing.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the Gavel Exec agent system, including dispatchers, agent interfaces, harness semantics, retries, guardrails, and latency budgets.
• Define evaluation standards, build offline/online evaluation infra, and use results to gate releases.
• Lead the full technical roadmap across the stack: live indexing, hybrid search, grounding playbooks and precedents.
• Drive platform decisions with Relativity: infra footprint, identity, tenancy, data residency, security, and MCP integration.
• Promote high-quality, high-velocity delivery through best-in-class engineering tools and practices.
• Mentor Lead and Senior engineers; shape technical hiring and onboarding for senior roles.
• Remain hands-on and ship continuously, tackling the hardest, highest-leverage problems.

Skills

Algorithms

Automation

Debugging

Distributed Systems

Performance Tuning

Problem Solving

Project Management

Software Development

System Designs

Technical Leadership

Tools

AWS

Azure

Containers

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

Enterprise Identity

Job description

**ABOUT THE ROLE**As the Staff Software Engineer for Gavel Exec, you will serve as the full-stack technical owner of the product and its agentic architecture. You will set the direction for the harness, context pipeline, and evaluation system over the next two to three years and own the quality bar that enables lawyers to trust the output.You will work directly with Gavel’s CTO on architecture, amplify the effectiveness of the engineering team, and represent Gavel engineering across the broader Relativity technology organization.* Level: Staff, the senior-most individual contributor on the team* Reports to: Pierre Martin, CTO of Gavel and VP of Engineering at Relativity* Location: Remote within the United States, Seattle, or Chicago**WHAT YOU’LL DO*** Own the architecture of the Gavel Exec agent system, including dispatcher and specialist agents, tool interfaces, harness semantics, retries, structured outputs, guardrails, cost and latency budgets, and the boundary between deterministic and model-driven logic.* Set the evaluation strategy by defining quality standards for each agent, building offline evaluation infrastructure and online acceptance-rate instrumentation, and using evaluation results to gate releases.* Lead the full technical roadmap across the stack, including live indexing, hybrid search, and playbook and precedent grounding.* Drive platform decisions with Relativity, including infrastructure footprint, identity, tenancy, data residency, integration with the broader AI platform and MCP surfaces, and enterprise security requirements.* Drive a modern software development lifecycle that supports high-quality, high-velocity delivery through best-in-class agentic engineering tools and practices.* Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, pairing, and written technical direction. Mentor Lead and Senior engineers, help define the technical hiring loop, and interview senior candidates.* Remain hands-on and ship continuously, especially on the hardest and highest-leverage problems.**WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR****Required*** 10+ years of experience building production software, including at least 2 years shipping LLM-based products to real users and at least 5 years in a service-oriented, continuously deployed environment.* Demonstrated ownership of an agentic system in production, including multi-step tool use, orchestration across specialist components, failure handling, tracing, cost, latency, and incident response.* Deep, practical understanding of the modern AI engineering stack, including prompt and context engineering, structured outputs, function calling, retrieval, reranking, evaluation design, fine-tuning trade-offs, and model routing across providers.* Strong distributed systems fundamentals and hands-on cloud infrastructure experience, with AWS or Azure experience or a willingness to develop deep expertise quickly.* Experience with containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and enterprise identity.* Fluency in TypeScript or Python and the ability to work across a React frontend, Node or Python services, and PostgreSQL.* Direct experience building full-stack web applications and agentic applications.* A track record of setting technical direction that strong engineers follow and communicating complex trade-offs clearly to product, business, and security stakeholders.* A strong commitment to simplicity and sound judgment about when abstractions add value.**WHY WE COULD BE A GREAT FIT****Impactful Mission*** Build systems that help customers organize data, discover the truth, and act on it in high-stakes legal matters.**Engineering at Scale*** Work on distributed, cloud-native systems that process large volumes of data.**Cutting-Edge Technology*** Build with AI, cloud platforms, and scalable architectures shaping legal tech.**Growth and Ownership*** Gain experience owning systems end-to-end across cloud and distributed environments.**Collaborative Culture*** Work in a team focused on knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.**Inclusive Environment*** Diverse perspectives create stronger teams and better outcomes.**Compensation and Benefits*** Competitive salary, benefits, DTO, parental leave, and 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:$174,000 and $262,000The 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:**Algorithms, Automation, Debugging, Distributed Systems, Performance Tuning, Problem Solving, Project Management, Software Development, System Designs, Technical Leadership