Lead Software Engineer - AI Surfaces

Relativity is hiring a hands-on Lead Software Engineer to drive a major slice of Gavel focused on AI surfaces. In this hybrid role based in Illinois, you will own the technical plan across the front end, harness, and data layer, partnering with engineering, product, design, and shared platform and security teams to move from roadmap to production impact.

Role focus

You will own the technical roadmap and delivery for your area, turning ambiguous product goals into shippable milestones and sequencing work across the full stack. The position includes building and operating agentic capabilities and the infrastructure behind them, then running the evaluation and release loop needed to ship reliably.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap and delivery for your area, from design through production monitoring.
• Convert ambiguous goals into shippable milestones and sequence execution across the stack.
• Design and build agents and the infrastructure they run on, including tool definitions, prompts and context assembly, structured outputs, guardrails, evaluation sets, and the Word and web experiences that surface them.
• Run the evaluation and release loop for your agents.
• Track acceptance rates, determine why results shift, and decide whether changes are ready to ship.
• Promote a modern squad development lifecycle using small, frequent commits, feature-flagged production deployments, fast rollbacks, and daily use of agentic engineering tools to improve quality and velocity.
• Partner directly with Dorna Moini, Pierre Martin, product, and design on what to build next, and engage with customers when clarity from available data is insufficient.
• Lead design reviews, define coding and testing standards for the squad, mentor Senior and Advanced engineers, and participate in hiring.
• Collaborate with Relativity platform and security teams on shared infrastructure, identity, or compliance touchpoints.

Requirements

• 8+ years building production software in service-oriented, continuously deployed teams, including at least 1 year shipping LLM-based products or features to real users.
• Direct experience building full-stack web applications and agentic applications, including ownership of at least one production agentic capability involving tool use and function calling, multi-step orchestration, structured outputs, retries and failure handling, and observation and debugging of non-deterministic systems.
• Practical evaluation experience, including building evaluation sets, selecting metrics, using LLM-as-judge appropriately, and linking offline outcomes to online results.
• Solid understanding of retrieval and context engineering, including embeddings, hybrid search, chunking, and ranking strategies with context budgeting.
• Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience with AWS or Azure, plus comfort with containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and production observability (or willingness to develop deep expertise quickly).
• Fluency in at least TypeScript or Python, with the ability to work across the stack including React front ends, Node or Python services, and PostgreSQL.
• Experience leading technical work for a small team through planning, reviews, unblocking, and engineering development while continuing to deliver meaningful code.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining model-quality regressions to lawyers and scoping trade-offs to founders.
• Strong drive for simplicity and judgment to separate useful abstractions from unnecessary ones.

Technologies

• TypeScript, Python, React, Node, PostgreSQL
• AWS, Azure
• containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code
• LLM-as-judge, embeddings, hybrid search, chunking, ranking strategies

Compensation and benefits

• Competitive salary, benefits, DTO, parental leave, and an equity program.
• Annual performance bonus.
• Long-term incentives.
• Expected total compensation includes a competitive base salary, an annual performance bonus, and long-term incentives.
• Salary range: $150,000 to $224,000 (expected).

Posting type: Hybrid/Remote. May be based remotely in the United States or in Seattle or Chicago. Location: Illinois (hybrid).

Required skills

• Documentations
• Innovation
• Leadership
• Problem Solving
• Process Improvements
• Project Management
• Quality Assurance (QA)
• Risk Management
• Technical Knowledge
• Troubleshooting