Software Architect - Legal AI

🌟 About YouDo you love turning messy systems into elegant, reliable platforms? Are you excited to tame complexity; refactor a growing monolith, carve out clear domain boundaries, add rock-solid tests, and ship confidently with blue-green/canary releases? Do you enjoy designing pragmatic architectures for AI-heavy products where nondeterminism, latency, and cost all matter? If that’s you, we’d love to talk.🚀 About OmnilexOmnilex is a young dynamic AI legal tech startup with its roots at ETH Zurich. Our passionate interdisciplinary team of 10+ people is dedicated to empowering legal professionals in law firms and legal teams by leveraging the power of AI for legal research and answering complex legal questions. We already stand out with handling unique software challenges, including our combination of external data, customer-internal data and our own innovative AI-first legal commentaries.🛠️ Your ResponsibilitiesAs a Software Architect (Platform & Reliability), you’ll own the technical architecture and developer experience that make our AI features trustworthy, fast, and affordable to run.Own the architecture: define and evolve a clear, modular architecture (monorepo boundaries, domain-driven design, service contracts). Identify where services make sense; avoid cargo-cult microservices.Refactor for reliability: reduce tech debt in core legal research flows; simplify code paths; make failures isolated and recoverable.Testing strategy: establish a realistic test pyramid (integration/contract/e2e), golden datasets for AI flows, guardrails, and flakiness controls.CI/CD & releases: design fast pipelines, blue-green/canary strategies, feature flags/rollbacks, and safe migrations.Observability & ops: implement logging/metrics/tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry), SLOs/error budgets, on-call lightweight playbooks, and actionable dashboards.Data & performance: introduce caching, queues, and idempotent workers; reduce hot-path latency; manage LLM token/cost budgets.Environment strategy: set up solid dev/staging environments, seeded dev DBs, ephemeral preview environments, and reproducible local setups.Security & compliance: lead sane defaults for IAM, secrets, PII handling, backups/DR, and contribute to ISO-readiness practices.Cloud/Azure: guide pragmatic use of Azure (Gateway, Service Bus/Queues, Storage, Key Vault, AKS or Functions where appropriate).Collaboration: work closely with product, AI, and data engineering to turn ideas into stable, scalable platform capabilities; and mentor engineers on architectural tradeoffs and the capabilities and limits of AI code generation.📌 Qualifications✅ Minimum qualificationsYou’ve led several meaningful refactors or platform upgrades (probably you need 5+ years of professional experience building and operating production systems to genuinely claim this).Strong system design skills: domain boundaries, data modeling, API design, eventing/queues, caching, and consistency tradeoffs.Practical TypeScript experience (NestJS/Node.js) and SQL fundamentals (PostgreSQL).Proven track record with CI/CD, rollout strategies (blue-green/canary), and automated testing at scale.Hands-on observability: metrics, tracing, alerting; debugging prod incidents methodically.Comfort working with AI-driven systems (handling nondeterminism, latency/cost constraints, retries, fallbacks).Ownership mindset and clear, respectful communication.Availability full-time. On-site in Zurich at least two days per week (hybrid).Strong English🎯 Preferred qualificationsYou have a Swiss work permit or EU/EFTA citizenship.Azure experience (AKS or Azure Functions, API Management, Service Bus, Key Vault, Monitor/App Insights, Cognitive Search).Experience introducing ephemeral environments, contract tests, feature flags, and migration playbooks.Containerization and orchestration (Docker; Kubernetes knowledge is a plus, not a must on day one).Security by default (least privilege/IAM, secret management, encryption at rest/in transit); familiarity with ISO 27001 practices.Performance tuning in data/AI systems (queues, back-pressure, rate limiting, schema/index tuning).German proficiency🤝 BenefitsHigh leverage: your architectural choices directly improve stability, speed, and user trust.Autonomy & ownership: shape our platform, testing culture, and release safety nets.Real-world AI: build the foundations that make AI features reliable and cost-efficient.Team: collaborate with a sharp, interdisciplinary crew who ships.Compensation: CHF 9’000–13’000 per month + ESOP (employee stock options), depending on experience and skills.We’re excited to hear from candidates who want to build a clean, reliable, and scalable platform for AI-powered legal research. Apply today by pressing the Apply button.