Lead Engineer - Full-Stack | 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 several of our products - spanning frontend, backend, database and infra. You will shape and drive our product roadmap, set best practices for architecture, code quality and deployment. You will mentor and grow a team of engineers, help transform mid-level developers into senior contributors, and ensure the team consistently delivers high-impact, production-grade features.
You’ll work closely with product/design/legal/QA and domain-experts (judiciary, linguists, policy stakeholders). Your role is less about just shipping features, and more about building foundation: processes, standards, scalable architecture, developer culture, and long-term technical vision.

Key Responsibilities

Technical leadership & architecture: Define and own the overall architecture and technical direction of the product (frontend, backend, data, infra) - ensuring scalability, reliability, maintainability, and performance under load.
Make high-level design decisions (e.g. code structure, modules, APIs, services, database schema, infra, CI/CD, monitoring, security).
Product & roadmap collaboration: Work with product, design and domain teams to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions.
Help define, prioritize and estimate features, technical improvements, refactors, technical debt, and non-functional requirements.
Hands-on & delivery ownership: Continue writing production-quality code (frontend and backend) when needed, especially for complex, critical or foundational components.
Own delivery of core features end-to-end: from database schema design to frontend UI, APIs, backend services, infra/deployment.
Ensure high-quality releases, monitor production performance, handle incidents / debugging / performance tuning / scalability issues.
Team leadership & mentoring: Mentor and coach junior/mid-level engineers; provide guidance on design, patterns, coding style, testing, 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 web applications, with significant exposure across full-stack (frontend + backend + data + infra).
Strong proficiency with relevant technologies: for example - modern frontend frameworks (React / Next.js, TypeScript), backend languages (Go), and relational databases (PostgreSQL) - reflecting the current stack at Adalat AI.
Proven track record of delivering complex products end-to-end - from requirement gathering to architecture to delivery and maintenance.
Comfortable working in a fast-paced startup / early-stage environment where requirements can evolve; flexible mindset, self-driven, hands-on when needed.

Bonus / Nice-to-have:

Experience with audio/video/web-media (e.g. real-time audio playback, streaming, media APIs), if platform involves features like courtroom audio transcription.
Familiarity or interest in working at the intersection of technology + social impact / public systems / legal domain.
Experience with GraphQL, event-driven architectures, or microservices at scale.