Founding AI Product Engineer

Job summary

Work with customers and the founder to identify needs, shape product strategy, and build AI-native legal intelligence products from concept through production. Develop scalable backend services, data models, retrieval and identity-matching systems, and cloud data pipelines while debugging production systems and helping establish engineering practices.

Job details

LexDana · Greater Toronto Area, Ontario · Full-time · Hybrid Build the Future of Legal Intelligence This isn't a traditional software engineering role. It isn't an AI research role. And it isn't a role where you'll spend your days implementing tickets someone else wrote. We're looking for a senior, AI-native engineer who can identify customer problems, design products people genuinely need, and use AI to build them faster than a traditional engineering team ever could. You'll work directly with the founder, customers, and early design partners to shape both the product and the engineering culture of LexDana. About LexDana LexDana is building the legal memory layer for patent disputes. Every patent dispute has a history. Today, every legal team reconstructs that history from scratch — reading thousands of pages across prosecution, PTAB, ITC, district court, and the Federal Circuit. We're changing that. LexDana transforms millions of pages of legal records into a structured, cite-backed semantic memory layer that professionals can query, analyze, and trust. Every answer is grounded in the underlying record, never generated from thin air. The platform is built on more than 15 years of structured patent and litigation data developed by the team behind the Patexia rankings, which are used widely across the patent industry. LexDana is currently incubated within Patexia, but we're building it as an independent company with its own product, engineering culture, and long-term vision. This is a chance to be one of the first technical hires and help define what that company becomes. The Opportunity We're not looking for someone who simply writes code. We're looking for someone who understands customers, spots valuable opportunities, designs great products, and then builds them. The ideal candidate combines product thinking, software engineering, AI-native development, data engineering, and systems thinking — and is equally comfortable meeting with a customer, whiteboarding a product idea, designing system architecture, optimizing a SQL query, debugging cloud infrastructure, and reading production logs. You'll own problems from idea to production. What You'll Do Meet directly with customers to understand their workflows and uncover opportunities Translate ambiguous business problems into intuitive software products Design and build AI-native applications Use AI as your primary engineering tool to dramatically accelerate development Build scalable backend services and APIs Design systems that process and analyze millions of records Develop entity resolution and identity matching across complex datasets Design efficient data models and optimize large-scale SQL workloads Build cloud-native data pipelines Debug production issues across the full stack, from infrastructure to application code Collaborate with the founder on product strategy, technical architecture, and long-term vision Help establish engineering best practices and build the engineering culture as we grow What We're Looking For Required Strong senior-level software engineering experience building production systems An AI-native development mindset — you use AI every day to design, build, debug, and improve software Excellent product instincts, and the habit of identifying the customer problem before proposing a solution Comfort working without detailed specifications Strong SQL skills and experience with large datasets Experience designing scalable systems and debugging complex production environments Comfort working across frontend, backend, infrastructure, databases, and APIs Strong communication skills Strongly preferred — experience with several of the following: Data & retrieval: entity resolution, record linkage, identity matching, information retrieval, search systems, knowledge graphs AI systems: LLM applications, RAG, vector databases, semantic search Infrastructure & pipelines: data engineering, ETL, GCP, BigQuery, Cloud SQL Stack: Python, TypeScript, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, REST APIs You'll Thrive Here If You... Think like a founder and take ownership without waiting for permission Care deeply about solving customer problems, and love building products rather than features Move quickly while holding a high bar Switch easily between customer conversations, architecture discussions, SQL optimization, cloud infrastructure, and production code Use AI to amplify your engineering while keeping a deep understanding of the systems you build Ask "What should we build?" before "How should we build it?" This Might Not Be the Right Fit If... You prefer implementing detailed requirements over defining products You use AI as an occasional coding assistant rather than as the center of how you work You specialize deeply in one layer of the stack and prefer to stay there You prefer predictable work over ambiguity and rapid iteration Location This role is based in the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario, and is remote. You'll work closely with the founder and our entire team, with occasional travel — our best ideas come out of whiteboard sessions, customer conversations, and fast iteration in the same room. Why Join You'll be joining at the beginning of something ambitious. You'll work directly with the founder, influence the roadmap, help shape the engineering culture, and build technology that can change how patent professionals work with legal history. Compensation: CA$120,000 – CA$180,000 base salary, plus meaningful early-stage equity.

What you’ll do

Work with customers and the founder to identify needs, shape product strategy, and build AI-native legal intelligence products from concept through production. Develop scalable backend services, data models, retrieval and identity-matching systems, and cloud data pipelines while debugging production systems and helping establish engineering practices.

Requirements

Requires senior-level experience building production software, strong SQL and large-dataset skills, scalable systems expertise, and the ability to work across the full stack in ambiguous environments. The candidate should use AI routinely in development, have strong product instincts and communication skills, and ideally bring experience with retrieval or AI systems, data pipelines, cloud platforms, and the listed technology stack.

Benefits

• Early-Stage Equity

Listed skills

• Product Design · Preferred
• SQL · Preferred
• Python · Preferred
• TypeScript · Preferred
• PostgreSQL · Preferred

Other relevant skills

Identified from the job description. Confirm important requirements above.

• Software Engineering
• AI-Native Development
• Product Design
• Customer Discovery
• SQL
• Scalable Systems
• Data Engineering
• Entity Resolution
• Information Retrieval
• Large Language Model Applications
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Semantic Search
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Python
• TypeScript
• PostgreSQL

Job areas

• Software
• Technology
• Engineering
• Legal
• Data & Analytics