Product Engineer - Backend Leaning

Job description

Alma is an AI-native law firm. We combine AI with an exceptional legal team to deliver fast, transparent, and high-touch legal services at a fraction of the cost and speed of legacy firms. Our first market is immigration law. We're focused on simplifying complex immigration processes for companies and individuals, and disrupting the $15B market that has never seen an amazing product. We are backed by leading VCs such as [Bling Capital](https://www.blingcap.com/), [Forerunner](https://www.forerunnerventures.com/), [Village Global](https://www.villageglobal.vc/), [NFX](https://www.nfx.com/), [Conviction](https://www.linkedin.com/company/convictionvc/), [MVP Ventures](https://www.mvp-vc.com/), [NEA](https://www.nea.com/) and [Silkroad Innovation Hub.](https://silkroadinnovationhub.com/) # 🧠 Founding **Team** The founding team has an extensive background in the legal industry, consulting, and building ML platforms. - [Shuo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shuochen05/) - CTO & Cofounder: Shuo built the ML Platform (Michelangelo) at Uber for 5+ years after which he was the head of AI & ML team at a SupportLogic (a series B startup using predictive & generative AI for customer support). - [Aizada](https://www.linkedin.com/in/aizadamarat/) - CEO & Cofounder: Aizada is a graduate of Harvard Law School, an attorney with 7+ years of experience including working at a top law firm such as Cooley and an ex-McKinsey consultant. # 🔍 **What we're looking for** We're hiring a Product Engineer — a backend-leaning, AI-native engineer who owns features end-to-end, from database schema to the React component the user clicks on. You'll work directly with the founding team and early customers to ship a world-class AI-powered product, and help us scale our platform by 100x. We need you to be in the 99th percentile of having a "can-do" attitude. **You need to be deeply customer-obsessed.** At Alma, "customer" means two distinct groups, and you'll serve both. The first is our external customers - companies and individuals navigating immigration, often under stressful, high-stakes circumstances. The second is our internal legal team - the attorneys and paralegals who use our platform every day to do their work. They are just as much your customer as anyone paying us. If a workflow is clunky for them, that's a bug. If a tool saves them two hours a day, that's a feature worth shipping yesterday. The best engineers we'll hire will sit with the legal team, watch them work, and obsess over making their lives better - not just take requirements via Linear tickets. **We're moving away from the old model where backend engineers only do backend.** At Alma, the engineer who designs the API also builds the UI that consumes it. This isn't because we expect everyone to be a design genius — it's because shipping a feature end-to-end is faster, higher quality, and more fun than throwing work over a wall. With modern AI tooling, the traditional excuse of "frontend isn't my strength" no longer holds. If you're a strong backend engineer who's been intimidated by frontend, this is your moment - Claude Code and Cursor flatten that learning curve dramatically. **You also need to be an AI-native engineer.** We don't just build AI products - we build with AI. You should already be living inside modern coding harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.), wiring up MCP servers to extend your own workflow, and treating agents as a core part of how you ship. If your first instinct when facing a new problem is still "let me open a blank file and start typing," this role isn't for you. If your instinct is "let me spin up an agent to scaffold this, then review and harden it," keep reading. **You see problems as work to do, not things to complain about.** We move fast. That means our codebase has rough edges, our processes are still being invented, and not every corner is beautiful yet - that's a feature of being early, not a bug. We want engineers whose instinct, when they hit a messy module or a missing test or a confusing abstraction, is "I'll fix it" — not "who wrote this?" Complaining is cheap; shipping the fix is the job. If you're the kind of engineer who quietly improves the codebase around every feature you ship, you'll thrive here. If you need a pristine environment to do your best work, this isn't the right stage of the company for you. ## ✅ Responsibilities - Work closely with the founding team and early customers to build a world-class AI-powered product. - Own features end-to-end — architect the backend (server logic, databases, APIs), build the frontend that exposes them, and ship to production. - Partner with our designer and product team to translate user needs into shipped experiences — not just APIs that "the frontend team will integrate later." - Engage in the entire application lifecycle with a high bar for coding, debugging, testing, and deploying. - Operate as a force multiplier with AI tooling — use coding agents to move 5–10x faster than traditional engineers without sacrificing quality, and continuously evolve how our team builds, reviews, and tests software. ## 🛠 Role Requirements - Enjoy working in a fast-paced environment & wear multiple hats — including ones outside your historical comfort zone. - 2+ years of backend development experience, with demonstrated willingness (or eagerness) to own frontend work. You don't need to be a CSS wizard on day one, but you need to be the kind of engineer who'll learn React deeply rather than punt it to someone else. - Experience developing products built on top of LLMs / ML. - Proficient in Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, containerization and scaling microservices. - Comfortable in (or excited to ramp on) TypeScript, React, and modern frontend tooling. - Experience building products from zero to one. - Ability to seek & find the right resources for solving open-ended problems. - Daily, hands-on use of modern coding harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent) — not as autocomplete, but as a primary way of shipping production code. - Comfortable building and consuming MCP servers to integrate internal tools, data, and workflows into your dev loop. - Strong point of view on AI-assisted code review, automated testing, and how to keep quality high when shipping at agent speed. - Located in the San Francisco Bay Area or willing to relocate. - BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. ## ⭐️ Nice-to-haves - Experience working in a small startup environment (Seed or Series A). - Genuine full-stack experience — comfortable across backend, frontend, and infra. - Understand data lake / data warehouse. - Understand Transformer / Attention / GPU inference. - Experience with AWS, Supabase, LaunchDarkly & Betterstack. - Built your own MCP servers, custom agents, or internal AI dev tooling. - Published, blogged, or shared opinions about modern AI-assisted development workflows. ## Benefits & Perks - Hyper-competitive base salary range based on experience - 100% Health coverage + Vision + Dental - 20 days PTO + 10 Federal Holidays - $250 per month in wellness allowance