Remote-first (Kenya)
Adalat AI builds technology to reduce judicial delays and improve access to justice. We work with courts to turn complex, often manual processes into reliable digital workflows, giving judges and court staff more time for the work that needs their judgment.
We are looking for an experienced full-stack engineer based in Kenya to help adapt JUDA for African judicial systems. You will work directly with courts and closely with our engineering team in India, turning what you learn on the ground into production software.
Role Overview
You will be a core member of a fully remote engineering team, with ownership across discovery, technical design, implementation, deployment, and iteration. Your work will connect two perspectives: how courts actually operate and how we build a maintainable product that serves different jurisdictions.
That means spending time with court users, understanding their workflows and constraints, and writing the code that makes JUDA useful in their setting. You will contribute to the shared product and codebase as well as country-specific workflows and integrations.
The role is based in Kenya and includes travel to court partners as projects require. You should enjoy moving between focused engineering work and practical, in-person problem-solving.
Key Responsibilities
Understand court workflows. Work with judges, registries, court staff, and technical teams to understand daily operations, existing systems, and deployment constraints. Turn observations into clear requirements and practical engineering decisions.
Build across the stack. Design and ship user interfaces, backend services, APIs, and data models. Own features from early prototypes through testing, release, and production use.
Adapt JUDA to local settings. Translate differences in procedures, terminology, roles, permissions, and document workflows into usable product capabilities, while keeping the underlying product coherent.
Integrate with existing systems. Build and maintain integrations with court systems and partner services, with careful attention to data integrity, access controls, and failure handling.
Make deployments dependable. Work with platform and infrastructure engineers and local technical counterparts on deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, backups, and recovery. Help resolve production issues and address their underlying causes.
Protect sensitive court information. Build secure workflows and follow agreed access, handling, and deployment requirements in collaboration with security and legal colleagues.
Bring learning into the core product. Identify patterns across deployments and contribute reusable components, configuration, documentation, and product improvements that make subsequent implementations easier.
Work closely with India-based colleagues. Participate in technical design, code reviews, planning, and shared problem-solving with engineering, product, design, and ML colleagues. Communicate progress, trade-offs, and blockers clearly across the distributed team.
Qualifications
5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial hands-on full-stack development and ownership of production systems.
Strong frontend and backend fundamentals: building usable interfaces, designing APIs and data models, integrating systems, and debugging across the stack.
Depth in relevant technologies and the ability to learn others quickly. Our engineering stack includes TypeScript, Next.js, Node.js, Go, Python, and PostgreSQL; you do not need expertise in every part.
Experience writing maintainable, tested code and making sound trade-offs around performance, reliability, security, and delivery.
The ability to work directly with non-technical stakeholders, ask good questions, explain technical choices clearly, and turn incomplete requirements into workable solutions.
Independent ownership and good judgment: you can make progress through ambiguity, seek help when needed, and follow through after release.
Clear written and spoken English and effective collaboration in a remote team.
A base in Kenya and willingness to travel for court discovery, implementation, and deployment work.
Useful experience
Government, justice, legal-tech, civic-tech, or other complex institutional environments.
Customer-facing engineering or delivery across different countries and operating contexts.
Self-hosted or resource-constrained deployments, sensitive-data systems, or unreliable connectivity.
Workflow-heavy applications, document systems, or integrating AI capabilities into production products.
What You Will Achieve in a Year
Court users have software that fits their work. Deployments are reliable and maintainable. Local requirements become well-designed features, and lessons from each implementation strengthen JUDA for the next.
You will have meaningful ownership of both the software and how it works in practice, alongside an engineering team building toward more timely, accessible justice.
We keep our process straightforward and transparent. Here's what to expect:
R1 — Founder Chat (30 minutes)
An introduction to Adalat AI — our mission, the problem we're solving, and an initial conversation around role fit.
R2 — Technical Round (60 minutes)
A take-home assignment and a discussion about it.
R3 — Background Deep-Dive (60 minutes)
A focused discussion on your background — the problems you've worked on, what you've built, and how your experience connects to what we're doing at Adalat AI.
R4 — Offer
If it's a great match on both sides, we'll move forward with an offer.
Benefits and Perks
WFH with flexible work hours.
Unlimited PTO.
Autonomy and ownership.
Learning & development resources — including certifications relevant to this role.
Smart, humble, and friendly peers.
Maternity and paternity leaves.
Contacts within the Harvard / MIT / Oxford ecosystem.