CTO 230K- 270K Hybrid Equity High Growth Legal Tech Startup

📋 Description

• • Own the technology vision and execution for a high-growth legal-tech platform that is redefining how law firms and corporate legal teams operate. As our founding CTO you will sit on the executive team and report directly to the CEO, translating business strategy into a technical roadmap that scales from Series B to IPO.
• • Lead, mentor, and grow a cross-functional engineering organization of 25-30 engineers (full-stack, DevOps, QA, data, security) across San Francisco and remote hubs. Instill a culture of psychological safety, continuous delivery, and customer obsession while maintaining velocity above 40 story points per sprint.
• • Architect and scale a multi-tenant SaaS platform processing millions of sensitive legal documents per month. You will own end-to-end decisions on cloud infrastructure (Azure), micro-service boundaries, data-modeling, security controls (SOC-2, ISO-27001, HIPAA), and performance tuning that keeps page-load under 300 ms at 10× current volume.
• • Drive quarterly OKRs that balance feature innovation (AI-driven contract analytics, real-time collaboration, predictive insights) with non-functional excellence (99.9 % uptime, <30 min MTTR, zero critical security incidents). Present progress to the board and investors, translating technical metrics into business impact.
• • Partner shoulder-to-shoulder with Product, Sales, and Customer Success to translate complex legal workflows into intuitive product experiences. Run monthly “voice of customer” sessions with AmLaw 100 firms and Fortune 500 GCs to ensure roadmap alignment and rapid feedback loops.
• • Establish and enforce engineering best practices: trunk-based development, automated CI/CD via GitHub Actions + Azure DevOps, 80 % unit-test coverage, peer code-reviews, and blameless post-mortems. Champion a “you build it, you run it” DevOps culture with full observability (Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty).
• • Recruit, retain, and develop world-class talent. Build structured career ladders, mentorship programs, and diversity initiatives that increase representation of women and under-represented minorities in engineering by 25 % within 18 months.
• • Oversee budgeting and vendor management for a $3-4 M annual cloud and tooling spend. Negotiate enterprise agreements with Microsoft, GitHub, and security vendors to reduce cost per active user by 15 % year-over-year while improving capabilities.
• • Serve as the external face of technology—speaking at conferences, publishing thought-leadership pieces, and cultivating partnerships with Azure, legal-tech integrators, and elite law schools to maintain our brand as the most innovative platform in legal AI.
• • Ensure regulatory compliance across jurisdictions (GDPR, CCPA, state bar requirements). Work closely with Legal & Compliance to implement data-residency controls, encryption standards, and audit trails that exceed industry benchmarks.
• • Foster an experimentation mindset: allocate 20 % engineering capacity to R&D spikes, hack-days, and patent-worthy innovations. File at least two provisional patents annually in areas such as NLP for contract risk scoring or zero-trust document access.
• • Build a resilient on-call rotation and disaster-recovery strategy that guarantees <4 hour RTO and <1 hour RPO. Conduct quarterly game-day exercises and chaos engineering drills to validate preparedness.
• • Champion a remote-first yet highly collaborative culture. Implement rituals (weekly demos, architecture guilds, lightning talks) that keep distributed teams aligned and energized across time zones from PST to CET.