Lead Engineer (Hands-On) Legal Tech SaaS

Staff Engineer / Engineering Lead — Legal Tech SaaS (Remote, Full-Time)

Compensation: US$5,500-$8,500/month

About us

Summerall Law is a technology-forward estate planning firm, based in San Francisco, California, building a new platform called Essential Estates.

Essential Estates aims to automate and simplify estate planning and trust administration while reducing legal complexity and cost for families. So our users are both attorneys and families. The platform will eventually power estate planning services for multiple law firms.

We are a small but mighty team (3 developers, based in the Philippines and Brazil, and 1 designer) that values collaboration and close communication. We are nimble and fast. We embrace new AI tools and work closely with the founders of the company to drive excellence. We communicate in English via daily meetings & Slack.

The role

You'll be our most senior technical leader, reporting directly to the founders. You'll own architecture, reliability, security, and engineering standards for a production software system that attorneys and hundreds of clients depend on daily. This is a player-coach role: roughly 60–70% hands-on technical work, 30–40% team and process leadership. You'll manage what works today and help us build to drive growth.

What you'll do

• Own technical direction across the stack and make architecture decisions the team builds against

• Take ownership of site quality and reliability from day one — testing, deployment practices, monitoring, code review standards

• Ship production code on a meaningful cadence alongside the team

• Lead our AI strategy: extend our production LLM-powered client assistant safely (grounding, guardrails, evaluation), and design agentic development workflows (Claude Code, Cursor) so a small team does the work of a much larger one

• Convert business priorities into clear technical direction; communicate proactively with non-technical founders

• Coordinate a distributed team across Philippines, Brazil, and US time zones

• Participate in recruiting & hiring process for growing the engineering team as needed

What we're looking for

• 7+ years of production software experience, including 2–3+ years operating a business-critical system (on-call, incidents, migrations, real users)

• Experience as the most senior technical owner of a production system, with direct founder/executive exposure

• Deep TypeScript across the stack: React frontend, Node backend (NestJS or similar structured framework)

• PostgreSQL maturity — schema design, migrations, query performance

• AI-forward in two senses: you've built LLM-powered product features (ideally document-grounded/RAG with real guardrails), and you run agentic coding tools as a daily practice

• Comfortable owning outcomes, not just requirements

• Security-minded by default: auth, RBAC, careful data handling (we hold sensitive legal documents, with financial integrations on the roadmap)

• Excellent written and spoken English; proven remote collaboration with US stakeholders

• Low ego, high assertiveness — you can tell a founder no with a well-reasoned case, without making it personal

Nice to have

• Document generation pipelines (HTML/PDF/DOCX, Puppeteer) or rich text editors (Tiptap/ProseMirror)

• Plaid or other financial-institution integration experience

• Legal tech, fintech, or other compliance-adjacent domain background

• NestJS + TypeORM specifically

• Management experience