Lead Engineer

About the role

Lead the technical direction of a greenfield AI product for the legal industry. Own every technical decision - including the stack - and build it from zero to one. Build a greenfield product 0→1 - you choose the architecture, languages, and stack. Own technical decisions end-to-end: system design, performance, security, reliability and data residency. Set the engineering culture for a team that will grow About Corto We are CORTO, a cutting-edge software company dedicated to revolutionising the legal industry. Our mission is to empower legal practitioners with AI-driven solutions that streamline their workflow, boost productivity, and provide more efficient client service. Our team of AI experts and engineers collaborate to develop intelligent software tailored to the unique needs of lawyers, paralegals, and legal assistants. Our innovative AI solutions automate routine tasks, simplify document management, and enhance decision-making, allowing legal professionals to focus on what they do best-providing expert legal counsel. We're rapidly scaling from 80 to 150+ employees, with a highly technical workforce where around 90% of the team are developers and engineers. Working alongside our Sydney-based team of passionate high achievers, you'll join a fast-growing technology business where things rarely stay the same for long - and if you're smart, caring, and ambitious, you'll be in great company. The Opportunity We're building a new AI-driven product that will become foundational to our platform - helping lawyers get high-quality outcomes safely, with AI seamlessly embedded in their workflow. This is a rare greenfield opportunity: there is a clear product vision and a well-defined problem, but the build is yours to lead from a blank page. What makes it hard - and interesting - is the operating environment. The product handles confidential, privileged material for many firms at once, so it has to be safe by construction: Multi-tenant isolation. Per-tenant data residency. A hard safety boundary. Durable, long-running orchestration. A complete, tamper-evident audit trail. It starts deliberately focused, with an architecture designed so that new capabilities, integrations, and jurisdictions plug in cleanly as the product grows. Your architecture, your stack You will choose the languages, frameworks, cloud, data stores, and orchestration approach that you believe best meet the product's requirements. We care far more about the qualities the system must have than about any particular technology: Reliable, durable handling of long-running work - no request ever lost or left silent. Strong multi-tenant isolation and per-tenant data residency, enforced by design rather than by convention. A security-first posture suited to confidential data and the certifications firms expect (e.g ISO 27001, SOC 2). A deterministic, auditable safety boundary around what the AI is allowed to do - the AI proposes, code disposes. Clean seams so new capabilities and integrations can be added without rebuilding the core. If you have strong, well-reasoned opinions about how to build systems like this, you will have the autonomy to act on them. What you'll do As the Lead Developer, you will: Design and build the product end-to-end - from request handling and AI-driven understanding, through to durable task management and high-quality, reliable outputs - and make it foundational to our AI ecosystem. Own the Technical Architecture and the stack Define the Engineering Culture To make this happen, you will: Build a greenfield, multi-tenant product from zero to one, choosing the stack to fit the requirements. Build scalable, secure, high-performance backend services and a polished admin and supervision experience. Design a safety-first system: untrusted-input handling, a deterministic action boundary, per-tenant isolation and residency, and a complete audit trail. Build durable, resumable orchestration for long-running work that delegates to external services. Prototype, test, and refine AI-driven features that work reliably with generative AI models and agent-style workflows. Establish engineering processes, DevOps workflows, observability, and quality standards. Collaborate cross-functionally with other AI teams, product leaders, and senior stakeholders. What you'll bring You're a curious, self-driven engineer who wants to build meaningful technology. 8+ years of professional experience in full-stack development. Deep experience in system design, distributed systems, database architecture, and API design. A track record of making and owning architecture and technology choices - and being accountable for the results. Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend ecosystem and a modern frontend framework; able to work full-stack. Experience building secure, multi-tenant SaaS - ideally with data isolation, residency, encryption, and secrets management. Experience designing reliable, long-running or event-driven/asynchronous systems where work mus

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