Engineering Lead

About the Company

Adalat AI is building an end-to-end justice tech stack that automates manual and clerical pain points in courtrooms, giving judges back time to focus on what matters most: decision-making and delivering justice. Our solutions — from AI-powered transcription in Indian languages to case-flow management and document navigation — are now deployed across 10 states, covering over 5,300 courtrooms and approximately 20–25% of India's judiciary. Backed by leading technology companies and funders including Microsoft, Google Cloud, Tata Trusts, and Anthropic, and incubated at MIT and Oxford, Adalat AI is working to eliminate judicial delays and expand access to timely justice. Winners of the Harvard President's Innovation Challenge 2026, and with Sikkim becoming the first fully paperless state judiciary in India powered by Adalat AI, we are scaling rapidly across India and the Global South. Founded by a team with backgrounds in law, technology, and economics from Harvard, Oxford, MIT, and IIIT Hyderabad, we are building for the courts of tomorrow.

Role Overview

We're hiring an Engineering Lead to own the delivery of one of Adalat AI's core team's outcomes end-to-end. You'll drive multi-team projects, set the engineering processes and technical roadmap for your team, and be the primary point of contact with stakeholders across product, legal, and leadership. This is a role for someone with exceptional ownership — comfortable operating in a remote-first culture, managing people, resolving conflicts, and making the tradeoffs that keep a team shipping reliably.

Key Responsibilities

Own your team's deliverables end-to-end — from ideation all the way to production.
Drive alignment and coordination across multiple teams on projects that span team boundaries, resolving conflicting priorities and dependencies.
Set and evolve engineering processes for your team — planning cadence, release process, code review norms, on-call, incident response, and quality bars — suited to a remote-first way of working.
Own and communicate your team's technical roadmap, connecting day-to-day engineering work to broader product and business goals.
Act as the primary interface between your team and stakeholders (product, legal, design, leadership), translating ambiguous or competing requirements into a clear plan.
Manage, mentor, and grow engineers on your team — through 1:1s, career development, code reviews, and pairing.
Identify and resolve interpersonal or cross-functional conflict early, before it becomes a blocker to delivery.
Proactively surface technical debt, risk, and process gaps, and drive the initiatives that address them.

Qualifications

10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a track record of leading complex, multi-team technical initiatives to completion.
Strong coding skills across the stack. You need to be hands-on with the engineers and have a deep understanding of technical tradeoffs. We use Go in the backend, and Typescript in the frontend. Our infra is hosted on K8s.
Demonstrated experience managing engineers directly — hiring, mentoring, performance conversations, and career growth.
Strong experience working and leading in a remote or distributed team environment.
Proven ability to set up and run engineering processes (planning, quality standards, incident response) that scale with a growing team.
Comfortable navigating and resolving conflict — technical disagreements, cross-team dependency friction, or interpersonal issues — with sound judgment and directness.
Strong stakeholder management skills — able to represent engineering to non-engineering audiences and translate ambiguity into a roadmap.

Bonus / Nice-to-have:

Prior experience working in a legal, government, or other high-stakes regulated domain.
Experience building or scaling engineering teams from a small base.

What You Will Achieve in a Year

Fully own your team's deliverables end-to-end, with a track record of consistent, predictable delivery.
Establish a clear technical roadmap for your team, understood and bought into by both engineers and stakeholders.
Build strong, trusted relationships with stakeholders across product, legal, and leadership, becoming the go-to point of contact for your team's area.
Instill engineering processes and norms — planning, quality, incident response — that make your team more effective and are adopted beyond it.
Meaningfully grow the engineers you manage, and demonstrate the ability to navigate and resolve conflict without it slowing the team down.
Contribute directly to improving access to justice at scale — for real users, in real courtrooms.