AI Engineer - Backend
Build the Duely engine that turns data rooms with thousands of documents into legal deliverables. Keep it reliable, secure and efficient to run.
About Duely
Duely is the first AI-native legal service provider for M&A in the Benelux. Powered by technology we build ourselves, we deliver the M&A legal work for PE funds, family offices and corporate M&A teams, and deploy our technology through our API across VDR platforms and enterprise environments.
Clients instruct us as they would instruct a law firm and receive the finished work: data room preparation, gap analyses and full legal due diligence reports. Our AI engine does the heavy lifting, our legal experts direct and sign off on every deliverable, and we carry full responsibility for the output. We price per deliverable, not per billable hour.
Founded in Ghent by Michiel Van Lerbeirghe (former lawyer and GC) and Michiel De Koninck (AI engineer and legal-tech lead), we have raised €1.1 million in venture capital, and our technology is integrated directly into Sterling's global VDR platform. We are still small enough to fit in one room, so you will directly shape how the company is built.
Our values
- Excellence in execution. An eye for detail in deliverables, both external and internal. Crossing your t's and dotting your i's.
- Everybody sales. Everyone has the growth of the business in mind.
- Take ownership. Our culture allows everyone to speak their mind: do so, and take ownership where you know you can make a difference.
- Be brutally honest: no ego. To grow, as a team and individually, we need to give each other constant and useful feedback, respectfully.
About the role
As an AI Engineer you build the platform the Duely engine runs on. It does the heavy lifting behind live M&A deals: ingesting, processing, and analyzing hundreds of thousands of documents a month.
Our stack today is Postgres, Flask, Azure Container Apps and Functions for compute, OTel with Azure Monitor and Langfuse for observability. We are constantly re-evaluating this stack and want you to chip in!
You'll work alongside other AI engineers and M&A lawyers to take ideas to production, serving our internal deal team and, through our API, 2% of the global deal market.
The API is the backbone of our services work, serving data rooms across the world. We have the shortest feedback loop there is — we're dogfooding our own product — and what we learn there flows straight into the API, where we're present in 2% of global deals through our VDR partnerships. Best of both worlds type stuff: you can experiment constantly on product development and then work on hardcore engineering stuff to scale it to processing hundreds of thousands of documents a month.
Simon Palstermans
Founding Engineer
Responsibilities
- Build and run the document pipelines. Extract content from tens of thousands of documents per data room, enrich with metadata, and detect anomalies.
- Own the infrastructure. Compute, storage, networking, deployments on Azure managed in Terraform.
- Improve the SDLC. Remove bottlenecks so features and fixes ship as soon as they're ready.
- Set up alerting and observability. Catch issues quickly and get to the root cause fast.
- Design for security. Every service, pipeline and endpoint ships with security thought through from the start.
- Optimize costs. Run services efficiently and keep costs in check as we grow.
Requirements
- Strong backend fundamentals. Fluent Python, API design, relational databases.
- Experience with data-intensive systems in production. You have built high-throughput APIs that process large volumes of data reliably.
- Cloud and infrastructure experience. You have built and operated systems on Azure, AWS or GCP, and managed infrastructure as code.
- Testing and observability. Knowledge of testing best practices and experience running monitoring in production.
- You want to be in the room. This role is on-site in Ghent.
- Bonus: experience with LLM applications, OCR or document processing, or security and compliance in regulated domains.
Why Duely
- Meaningful equity, early. You are joining early enough that your slice matters more than rounding to zero.
- The shortest feedback loop you will find. Left of you there's a services engineer using your APIs daily, right of you there's a lawyer hinting at the need for new features. In the middle there's you: taking it all in and defining the impact on our infrastructure.
- A profession being rebuilt. M&A legal work is being reinvented right now. Help decide what it looks like in an AI-native world.
- Free lunch. Oh, you thought there was no such thing? There is at Duely. All meals at our office are paid for because we love to fuel your engine. MVL's tuna salad is quite legendary, Simon's yoghurt is quite dairy.
The team posing in their plant-filled (bit problematic) kitchen. LTR: Lucas, Simon, MVL, Arne, MDK
Ready to build with us?
Head over to the application tab and tell us about yourself. We read every application. What matters most is that you see the future of this work the way we do: not building tools for lawyers, but doing the work itself, with engineers and lawyers in the same room.
Prefer something less formal? Mail us directly at careers@duely.ai.