Lead Engineer - Backend Platform | Careers

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 9 states, covering nearly 20% of India’s judiciary. Backed by leading technology companies and funders, and incubated at MIT and Oxford, Adalat AI is working to eliminate judicial delays and expand access to timely justice. Founded by a team with backgrounds in law, technology, and economics from Harvard, Oxford, MIT, and IIIT Hyderabad, we are scaling rapidly across India and the Global South.

Role Overview

As a Lead Engineer at Adalat AI, you will own technical leadership for the backend systems that power our products — spanning APIs, databases, and infrastructure. You will shape and drive our backend roadmap, set best practices for architecture, code quality, and deployment, and ensure our systems are scalable, reliable, and production-grade.

You will mentor and groom a team of engineers, and transform them into senior contributors, and work closely with product, design, legal, QA, and domain experts (judiciary, linguists, policy stakeholders) to translate complex requirements into robust technical solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Technical leadership & architecture
Define and own the overall backend architecture and technical direction — ensuring scalability, reliability, maintainability, and performance under load. Make high-level design decisions across API design, service boundaries, database schema, infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and security.
Product & roadmap collaboration
Work with product, design, and domain teams to translate business requirements into robust backend solutions. Help define, prioritize, and estimate features, technical improvements, refactors, and non-functional requirements (performance, reliability, security).
Hands-on delivery ownership
Continue writing production-quality backend code when needed, especially for complex, critical, or foundational components. Own delivery of core backend systems end-to-end — from data modelling and schema design to API contracts, service logic, and deployment. Ensure high-quality releases, monitor production performance, and handle incidents, debugging, and performance tuning.
Infrastructure & observability ownership
Take ownership of infrastructure maintenance — managing Kubernetes clusters, handling upgrades, capacity planning, and ensuring platform reliability. Set up and maintain observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki) to give the team deep visibility into system health, performance, and incidents.
Team leadership & mentoring
Mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers; provide guidance on system design, coding patterns, testing strategies, debugging, and best practices. Participate in hiring, onboarding, and building a strong engineering culture.

Qualifications

10+ years of professional experience building and shipping production-grade backend systems and APIs.
Strong proficiency in Go and relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL — including schema design, query optimisation, and migrations.
Proven track record of architecting and delivering complex backend systems end-to-end — from requirement gathering through to deployment and ongoing maintenance.
Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (k8s) — including cluster management, workload configuration, scaling, and day-to-day infra maintenance.
Solid grasp of broader infrastructure fundamentals: containerisation (Docker), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments.
Comfortable working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment where requirements evolve; self-driven, flexible, and hands-on when needed.

Bonus / Nice-to-have

Familiarity with real-time data pipelines or streaming backends.
Familiarity with Frontend technologies (React, Next.js).
Interest in or experience working at the intersection of technology and social impact, public systems, or the legal domain.

What You Will Achieve in a Year

Full ownership of the backend platform which drives all of our ML features.
Improve architectural issues and long-term technical debts in the platform.
Own the ecosystem around k8s clusters, and incorporate deployment hygiene and security best practices.