Founding AI Product Engineer

Lex Dana
· Century City, Los Angeles
· Full-time
· On-site 3–4 days/week

This isn't a traditional software engineering role. It isn't an AI research role. And it isn't a role where you'll spend your days implementing tickets someone else wrote.

We're looking for someone who can identify customer problems, design products people genuinely need, and use AI to build them faster than a traditional engineering team ever could. You'll work directly with the founder, customers, and early design partners to shape both the product and the engineering culture of Lex Dana.

If you're happiest turning ambiguous ideas into production software, read on.

Lex Dana is building the legal memory layer for patent disputes.

Every patent dispute has a history. Today, every legal team reconstructs that history from scratch — reading thousands of pages across prosecution, PTAB, ITC, district court, and the Federal Circuit. We're changing that.

Lex Dana transforms millions of pages of legal records into a structured, cite-backed semantic memory layer that professionals can query, analyze, and trust. Every answer is grounded in the underlying record, never generated from thin air.

The platform is built on more than 15 years of structured patent and litigation data developed by the team behind the Patexia rankings, which are used widely across the patent industry. Lex Dana is currently incubated within Patexia, but we're building it as an independent company with its own product, engineering culture, and long-term vision.

This is a chance to be one of the first technical hires and help define what that company becomes.

We're not looking for someone who simply writes code. We're looking for someone who understands customers, spots valuable opportunities, designs great products, and then builds them.

The ideal candidate combines product thinking, software engineering, AI-native development, data engineering, and systems thinking — and is equally comfortable meeting with a customer, whiteboarding a product idea, designing system architecture, optimizing a SQL query, debugging cloud infrastructure, and reading production logs.

You’ll own problems from idea to production.

• Meet directly with customers to understand their workflows and uncover opportunities
• Design and build AI-native applications
• Use AI as your primary engineering tool to dramatically accelerate development
• Build scalable backend services and APIs
• Design systems that process and analyze millions of records
• Develop entity resolution and identity matching across complex datasets
• Design efficient data models and optimize large-scale SQL workloads
• Debug production issues across the full stack, from infrastructure to application code
• Collaborate with the founder on product strategy, technical architecture, and long-term vision
• Help establish engineering best practices and build the engineering culture as we grow

Required

• Strong software engineering experience building production systems
• An AI-native development mindset — you use AI every day to design, build, debug, and improve software
• Excellent product instincts, and the habit of identifying the customer problem before proposing a solution
• Comfort working without detailed specifications
• Strong SQL skills and experience with large datasets
• Experience designing scalable systems and debugging complex production environments
• Comfort working across frontend, backend, infrastructure, databases, and APIs

Strongly preferred — experience with several of the following:

• Data & retrieval: entity resolution, record linkage, identity matching, information retrieval, search systems, knowledge graphs

• Think like a founder and take ownership without waiting for permission
• Care deeply about solving customer problems, and love building products rather than features
• Move quickly while holding a high bar
• Switch easily between customer conversations, architecture discussions, SQL optimization, cloud infrastructure, and production code
• Use AI to amplify your engineering while keeping a deep understanding of the systems you build
• Ask "What…