Staff Software Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer (individual contributor role, not a people manager). You will be the technical anchor of our foundational team, working directly with the CEO to architect and write the code for a brand-new vertical AI product for intellectual property (patents). This is a rare, de-risked startup opportunity. We aren't searching for a product-market fit or guessing what to build; our product roadmap is already validated by our deeply engaged customers, which include Fortune 500 corporations and AM Law 100 legal firms. You will be leading the charge to turn this massive validated demand into a production-grade enterprise reality. You will own the system design and development for agentic AI applications, heavy language analytics pipelines, and deterministic search/retrieval at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Search and Retrieval: Architect and build industry-leading patent search and retrieval products, spanning over 180 million patents.
• LLM applications: Build AI applications for patent drafting and patent intelligence use cases for Fortune 500 companies.
• Infrastructure: Architect and deploy our cloud-native system design entirely on AWS, establishing the core infrastructure for high-scale LLM orchestration and model deployment.
• Backend Services: Build high-performance language analytics and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines, delivering clean, lightning-fast data APIs to our custom React frontend.
• Enterprise SaaS Functionality: Design and implement robust enterprise-grade controls, including Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), advanced data security, real-time collaboration features, and automated subscription billing systems.
• Data and Partner Integrations: Build resilient integration layers to ingest and normalise external data feeds from global patent offices, intellectual property registries, research databases, and strategic partners.
• Frontend Guidance: Act as the technical anchor for our product ecosystem, guiding front-end development to ensure seamless end-to-end integration and exceptional UI performance.
• Growth Optimisation: Partner with the business track to design technical instrumentation for product experimentation, user analytics tracking, and conversion marketing funnels.

Requirements:

• [Mandatory] 4+ years of experience with Python and FastAPI.
• [Mandatory] Building and designing microservices for production applications.
• [Mandatory] Architecting and building secure and scalable microservices on AWS (relevant AWS services include EKS, EC2 RDS, IAM, and S3).
• [Mandatory] Experience building with Claude Code or equivalent tools.
• [Mandatory] Proven track record of architecting and building 0-to-1 applications or data platforms completely from scratch.
• [Mandatory] Ability to thrive in zero-to-one environments and be comfortable wearing multiple hats.