Product Engineer (Backend)

About Alaro Alaro is building the next generation of legal services. We’re an AI-native law firm, built from day one around AI and data. Legal is a trillion-dollar global industry that still operates as if software never happened. Lawyers spend too much time on low-leverage work and too little on judgment, reasoning, and outcomes. AI is now rapidly realigning what’s possible. We believe AI doesn’t replace legal judgment - it replaces the operating model around it. Firms that rebuild around this shift will define the next era of legal services; others will struggle to justify their costs as AI reshapes client expectations. We started Alaro in April 2025 and raised a $2M pre-seed followed by an $7M seed led by a tier-1 US VC. Our product is used daily by our own lawyers on real cases, creating a tight feedback loop between product and practice. With early customers and a world-class engineering team taking shape, it’s still day one - come build with us. How we work We move fast, then solidify: We ship early to get real work into lawyers’ hands, then invest in stabilizing and improving what matters. Progress beats polish, but quality is non-negotiable. High ownership, flexible schedules: We care about outcomes. You’re trusted to manage your time and take responsibility for what you ship, closing loops when things break. AI-native by default: We use AI everywhere, not just in the product. Our codebase and workflows are designed so humans and agents work together. Remote-first, globally aligned: We work as a distributed team, stay tightly aligned through regular syncs, and get together in person when it matters. What we offer Meaningful ownership : Competitive salary and meaningful equity, with real responsibility and impact from day one. Small team, real impact : You’ll work closely with founders and a small group of senior engineers, shaping core systems, culture, and how the company operates as it grows. AI-first tooling : An unlimited budget for AI coding agents and tools. We expect you to use them heavily, and we design our systems so they can actually help. Time together that matters : We bring the whole company together once a year for an offsite in Alaro (Mallorca), and regularly gather the team in one of our offices to align, whiteboard, and plan in person. About the Role You will build the backend systems that make Alaro’s product reliable, extensible, and safe to use in real legal work. These systems power everything lawyers see and trust: documents, matters, permissions, agent actions, and the workflows that tie them together. At a high level, we are building a Cursor-like environment for legal work, where lawyers collaborate with agents that can search, reason, and act on documents, while remaining auditable, reversible, and correct. The backend defines what is possible here, and what is safe. This is a product-first backend engineering role. To succeed, you’ll need to understand the full product surface and agent behavior, so you can design systems that evolve quickly without breaking under real-world usage. What you’ll build Core product APIs : design and evolve the APIs that power the lawyer dashboard: matters, documents, chats, permissions, and email integration, so legal work stays coherent across tools, collaborators, and time. Data models and pipelines : define and maintain data structures that support evolving product and agent workflows, including document state, provenance, permissions, and history. You’ll think carefully about boundaries, migrations, and long-term extensibility. Agent-facing backend surfaces : build the primitives that let agents safely operate in the system: scoped permissions, state transitions, execution boundaries, and backend objects that unlock new tools and workflows without sacrificing control. Infrastructure and reliability : own backend systems in production. Contribute to deployments, observability, performance, and cost awareness, while keeping the focus on product reliability rather than infrastructure for its own sake. Who you are We’re looking for backend engineers who care deeply about building systems that work in production and continue to work as products evolve. You take ownership end to end, are comfortable with ambiguity, and enjoy designing systems that other engineers and agents can build on safely. You’ll thrive at Alaro if you: Ship production backend systems with high ownership and follow them through when they break. Design data models and APIs that evolve quickly without constant rewrites. Are comfortable building in Python across application logic, data engineering, and light infrastructure work. Can translate ambiguous product goals into reliable systems that real users depend on. Are excited to build the backend foundations that enable powerful product and agent workflows. Location We work remote-first with a preference for time zone overlap between GMT-5 and GMT+1. You can also choose to work from our offices in London or New York.