LawVu is a fast-growing New Zealand software company with a global footprint. Our legal workspace is the go-to platform for in-house legal teams, and we're backed by top venture capital firms like Insight Partners and Airtree Ventures. We're all about transforming the legal world, one line of code at a time.

Join the LawVu team that's on a mission to revolutionise legal work using AI. In this role, you'll help accelerate legal processes, drive creativity, and bring fresh solutions to an industry ready for change. This is a chance to work on the cutting edge of legal tech, making a real impact on the future of legal ops and with an awesome team of humans!

The Tech Lead is the senior technical voice of the Kernels squad — a hands-on engineer and pragmatic architect who sits between deep, day-to-day development and strategic technical direction. You own the technical integrity of what the squad ships, guide architecture and system design, and raise the engineering capability of everyone around you through example, coaching, and review.

You lead technically without needing formal people-management authority to do it — influencing through credibility, clarity, and consistently good decisions. You partner closely with your Engineering Manager, Product Manager, and Designer as part of the squad's trio, and you are the person the squad turns to when a design decision, an incident, or a hard trade-off needs a confident, well-reasoned call.

What you will be doing:

This is a technical leadership position that blends hands-on engineering with architectural ownership and mentorship — the outcomes below span code, architecture, security, delivery, and innovation.

Technical Leadership

• Lead by example: ship code alongside the squad, run regular code reviews, and set the standard for quality, craftsmanship, and best-practice adoption across the team.

• Support the Engineering Manager: provide the technical guidance, estimates, and architectural context that underpin squad planning and delivery decisions.

• Lead with integrity: build an inclusive, values-driven culture — admitting mistakes openly, delegating rather than micromanaging, and staying calm and constructive under pressure.

Architecture & System Design

• Own the architecture: define and maintain the squad's technical architecture, standards, and roadmap — evaluating new frameworks and tools, and ensuring non-functional requirements (scalability, security, maintainability) are met.

• Own reliability at scale: establish and maintain SRE practices for the domain — error budgets, SLOs, and monitoring — and run load and performance testing with deployment risk assessment built into every release, so the squad ships safely at scale.

• Keep tech debt in check: maintain a prioritized tech debt backlog (risk, impact, effort), balancing debt reduction against delivery commitments, in partnership with the Engineering Manager, Product Manager, and QA.

• Make the call: make critical technical decisions using data and evidence, balancing innovation with stability, and documenting your rationale for transparency.

Security & Compliance

• Protect the platform: maintain and improve strict security protocols for our multi-tenant environment, including regular security reviews and compliance with data protection standards.

AI & Innovation

• Push the tech forward: apply AI-native tools and practices day to day — from AI coding assistants to Retrieval-Augmented Generation, evaluations, and vector search — while applying responsible AI practices (bias mitigation, privacy, ethical use) and keeping the squad current on relevant advances.

Collaboration & Delivery

Connect the dots: partner with Product, Design, your Engineering Manager, and engineering leadership on roadmap planning, backlog refinement, and estimates — resolving blockers and keeping delivery risk visible early.

• Lead the technical response: act as Incident Commander for domain-critical technical issues — driving diagnosis and the fix and running the technical postmortem. Your Engineering Manager owns change management and keeps the wider team and stakeholders informed.

• Stay close to customers: engage in customer interviews, research sessions, and support escalations alongside the trio translating customer pain points into technical requirements and architectural decisions.

• Communicate clearly: translate technical concepts, risks, and technology recommendations for business stakeholders, balancing business needs with technical reality.

What we need from you:

• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and supporting large-scale systems.

• Strong proficiency in C# .NET Framework / .NET Core, and REST API design and development.

• Solid understanding of Azure PaaS and Azure Web App services.

• Experience with GitHub, including CI/CD pipelines and modern engineering workflows.

• At least two or more real-world experiences in: Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Evaluations, Azure Content Understanding, Semantic Kernel, or MS Agent Framework.

• Experience integrating and deploying AI models and AI services in cloud infrastructure.

• Experience designing, conducting, and analysing experiments to validate hypotheses and optimise product features.

• Deep understanding of system architecture paradigms and the ability to pragmatically apply them to real-world scenarios.

• Comfortable working in an Agile development environment, with a strong focus on iterative development and continuous improvement.

• A self-starter who takes initiative, anticipates challenges, and drives projects forward with minimal supervision.

• A strong communicator, able to clearly articulate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders and inspire the team toward shared objectives.

• Experience navigating complex problems from a technical, product, and people-development perspective.

Our Core Values:

• Inspire and Delight: We go the extra mile to create experiences that inspire and delight our customers.

• Move Swiftly: We get things done quickly and efficiently.

• Dig Deeper: No challenge is too big. We embrace challenges, learn from mistakes, and share knowledge.

• Take Ownership: We take responsibility for our actions and their impact on the business.

• Back Yourself. Back Others: We support and respect each other, building a high level of trust.

• Bring Your Woo: We create a safe environment that fosters bringing your whole self to work.

Location: 

The preferred location is Tauranga or Wellington, but other New Zealand locations will be considered for the right person.

Perks of Being a LawVu-er:

• Monthly wellness allowance for gym memberships, massages, childcare – you name it!

• Health insurance cover.

• Extended paid parental leave.

• Extra paid day off on your birthday (cake not included but highly encouraged).

• Share options – because you deserve a piece of the pie.

• Home office allowance for remote employees.

What To Expect from the Recruitment Process:

The aim is to make the recruitment process as efficient as possible, keeping you informed every step of the way.

• The first step is an initial conversation with our talent team/recruitment team to get to know you better and introduce you to LawVu and what we have to offer.

• The next step will be an in-person / remote coffee chat with 2 of our Engineering Leaders to discuss the role expectations in detail.

• Following the coffee chat, a Tech Test (Assignment) will be shared for completion. A successful outcome means an invite to meet the wider team, where you'll get to showcase your technical skills and knowledge.

• Finally, if we are both aligned, we wrap up the process with salary discussions and present you with an offer of employment.