Remote-first (India) · OCTO — Office of the CTO
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
You're the engineer for the Office of the CTO, which runs everything that isn't the core product: IT, infra, security and compliance, hiring, finance ops, vendors, internal analytics. Your users are your colleagues. The job is to stop them from doing things by hand.
The path from problem to production is short. Someone describes a painful manual process in Slack in the morning, and nothing stands between you and shipping a fix that week. You own what you ship, including when it breaks on a Monday.
Key Responsibilities
Own (Build, deploy, maintain) OCTO's internal tools.
Document and hand over these tools. Nothing you build should be a tool only you can run.
Get the prototypes to production, and ensure their security
Help in automating manual work across hiring, finance ops and compliance
Wire our systems together. Slack, Linear, Airtable, Google Workspace, GitHub, Notion. Workflows that don't need a human in the middle.
Build with LLMs where they actually help. We use Claude heavily. Agents that read our own systems are part of the stack here, not a novelty.
About You
You'd rather ship a small thing that works this week than design the right thing for next quarter. You're fine getting a vague complaint instead of a spec, and you go watch how the work actually happens before building. You understand the right stack to build a tool - knowing when a spreadsheet is the right answer and no code is needed at all, or when we should shift to a full self-hosted web-application.
Qualifications
5+ years shipping production software, with real end-to-end ownership.
Full-stack: a modern JS/TS frontend (we use Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind), a backend, and a relational database you can design and query.
You can deploy and operate what you build. Running, monitored, backed up, without handing it to an SRE.
Practical security instincts. You know why a tool with user data shouldn't sit on a personal account or a no-code platform, and you can fix it.
High agency and clear writing. OCTO is small, remote and async. There's no spec queue waiting for you.
Preferred: internal tools or platform/ops engineering, scripting (Python, Apps Script), experience in early-stage startup where you were the whole function.
What You Will Achieve in a Year
Every internal tool OCTO depends on runs on our infra with clear auth, logging and backups you can point to.
At least one manual process nobody asked you to fix is gone because you noticed it.
Compliance and security work is backed by real tooling
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.