Manager, Software Engineering – Customer Files Orchestration in Toronto

CoCounsel Legal is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead the team that owns the Customer Files Orchestration Service - the system that makes customer documents usable by CoCounsel Legal's agents. Every file a customer brings to CoCounsel passes through this team: upload, storage, extraction, embedding, and indexing, orchestrated end-to-end. You make millions of customer files available to CoCounsel.

This team is a critical part of what makes that combination possible. It is also, unavoidably, a hard distributed systems problem. Supporting millions of files means real engineering: dedicated workers, fair queuing so one busy customer cannot starve another, durable state, idempotent processing, and honest reasoning about consistency and delivery guarantees across systems.

The team owns what it builds, designing, implementing, testing, deploying, scaling, and operating the service end-to-end. This role will help take a recently formed, cross-functional group and shape it into a durable, high-performing engineering team with clear ownership, a stable operational posture, and the credibility to lead decisions about design, roadmaps, and opportunity costs within the team and across stakeholders.

In this position, you will:

• Service & Technical Leadership
• Own customer file orchestration service end-to-end - Upload, storage, content extraction, embedding, indexing, and observability and monitoring - balancing new capability delivery against reliability.
• Drive API-first execution - The file and workspace API this team owns serves a growing set of consumers beyond orchestration, treating them as a product - clear ownership, versioned contracts, documented behavior, deliberate change management, and independent deployability.
• Lead the team's judgment on the problems that define the domain - Consistency models, delivery guarantees, lease and heartbeat models for crash recovery, and state transitions across asynchronous service boundaries.
• Own the queuing and flow-control architecture - Fair queuing, rate limiting, backpressure, circuit breaking, dead-letter handling, and autoscaling.
• Champion full operational ownership - The team designs, builds, tests, deploys, scales, and operates what it ships - with on-call, incident response, SLOs, and testing treated as first-class engineering work.
• Partner with platforms and client applications teams to deliver a world-class product.
• Team Management
• Build and lead the Files Orchestration engineering team - Hiring, onboarding, performance, and career development.
• Develop engineers who combine distributed systems depth with real operational responsibility.
• Translate complex orchestration and scale trade-offs to product managers and business leaders.
• Establish operating rhythms and ways of working.
• Strong technical leadership via effective negotiation and influence.
• Strategic Delivery
• Define and maintain engineering processes - Rigorous design, code review, testing, and instrumentation.
• Establish service health benchmarks - Ingest throughput, end-to-end time-to-available, failure and retry rates, per-tenant fairness under load, and API reliability SLOs.
• Sequence foundational infrastructure work against product deadlines.
• Align the roadmap with CoCounsel's priorities.

You're an ideal fit if you have:

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Direct people management experience - 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years of managing engineers.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating large-scale, enterprise orchestration systems in production.
• Extensive AWS and production Python experience.
• Concurrency in Python, and a healthy respect for how treacherous it is.
• Containerized workloads on Kubernetes.
• Understanding of consistency models and delivery guarantees.
• Deep, practical understanding of queues, fair queuing, rate limiting, and backpressure.
• API-first instincts.
• Experience building, owning, and operating a production service end-to-end.
• Advanced knowledge of distributed systems design, cloud infrastructure, observability, and SDLC best practices.
• Excellent communication and the ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and architecture.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with documents and document management systems.
• Familiarity with team topologies.
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures and streaming.
• Experience with durable workflow engines.
• Prior exposure to the legal industry.

What Success Looks Like:

• Understand the pipeline end-to-end.
• Establish strong working relationships.
• Own day-to-day delivery and people leadership.
• Fix the highest-leverage near-term gaps.

In the first year:

• Lead the team through a major scale milestone.
• Grow a high-performing team.
• Establish orchestration as a trusted, measurably reliable service.
• Become a recognized leader within CoCounsel Legal Engineering.

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model.
• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance.
• Career Development and Growth.
• Industry Competitive Benefits.
• Culture of inclusion and belonging.
• Social Impact opportunities.
• Making a Real-World Impact.