AI Software Engineer

Position: AI Staff Software Engineer
Description

About Legal Zoom

Legal Zoom is on a mission to help people navigate the legal system with confidence and clarity. As a leader in online legal services for over 20 years, we combine technology, attorney-led solutions, and expertise to protect the aspirations, lives, and legacies of millions of customers. If you're ready to contribute to a collaborative, diverse, and distributed group of creative thinkers and problem-solvers, we can't wait to meet you.

This hybrid position will work remotely as well as onsite in our Austin, TX, Mountain View, CA, or Sherman Oaks, CA office.


Overview


We're looking for a Staff AI Engineer (Full Stack) who ships production AI systems. You'll build and own AI services that power Legal Zoom's products and internal tools-working across the stack from design through deployment.

We integrate best-in-class AI foundation models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google into real products. We prioritize shipping working solutions over research, perfect architectures, or bleeding-edge experiments.

You will

• Own AI systems end-to-end - Design, build, and operate production AI agents, RAG pipelines, MCP services, and agentic workflows-including observability, error handling, and other table stakes for production systems.
• Build on our AI platform - Extend our unified FastAPI + Pydantic
  
  AI monorepo, leveraging foundation model APIs (AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Gemini) and contributing patterns other teams can adopt.
• Collaborate across teams - Partner with Product, Engineering, Design, and Operations to identify high-value AI opportunities and embed intelligent capabilities into existing systems.
• Contribute across the stack - Write backend services, wire up basic React frontends when needed, and own your deployments.
• Other duties as assigned
• Occasional travel may be required as needed

You have

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2 years building production AI systems

Technical foundations:

• Strong Python backend skills - You write clean, maintainable code. You are familiar with frameworks and tools like FastAPI, Pydantic, uv, Postgres, REST APIs, and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred).
• Basic frontend literacy - You can build or modify a React UI for internal tools. Not a frontend specialist, but light frontend work doesn't block you. Bonus if you're comfortable in Type Script and Vercel AI-SDK.

AI expertise:

• AI-first engineering mindset - You use AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, etc.) in your day-to-day work. You believe in leveraging AI to build AI systems.
• Agentic AI experience - You've built multi-step agentic workflows with frameworks like Pydantic
  
  AI, Lang Graph, or AI-SDK. You're familiar with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and tool-use patterns. Bonus if you've built your own MCP server with something like FastMCP.

How you work:

• Pragmatic shipping mentality - You've taken projects from idea to production with real users. You right-size solutions and prefer simplicity.
• Clear communication - You can explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders and write documentation.
• Remote employees should confirm that the internet service available has adequate bandwidth to support all work processes.

Nice to have

• Experience with deployment using Docker, Git Hub Actions, and Kubernetes.
• Type Script experience and familiarity with Vercel AI-SDK for building AI-powered frontends.
• Background in legal tech, SMB, compliance, or regulated industries.
• Experience building internal developer platforms or shared services.

Don't check every box? If you're a fast learner with strong engineering fundamentals and genuine excitement about building AI products, we'd still love to hear from you.

What we're NOT looking for

This is not a research role. We're not fine-tuning foundation models on a regular basis or publishing academic papers. We're integrating best-in-class AI capabilities into real products that serve real customers. If you're energized by broad ownership and allergic to over-engineering, we want to talk. This role focuses on shipping products (not research), and full-stack versatility (not narrow specialization).

Legal Zoom is a remote-first company and the national range for…