Start Here: Product Engineering at Orbital

Welcome to our Product Engineering Guide. It’s a curated collection of posts that tell the story of how we build at Orbital. Whether you’re considering joining us or just curious about our approach, this is the best place to start. We’re genuinely proud of what we’ve built and excited to share it with you.

Scale & Impact

We’ve processed over 100 billion tokens through our AI systems, making us one of the highest-volume legal AI applications in the world. It’s been quite a journey and here’s what it looked like:

From Launch to 100 Billion Tokens — A look back at 2025: the year Orbital Copilot went from ambitious experiment to industry milestone (Andrew Thompson, CTO)

How We Build Product

Our AI Assistant, Orbital Copilot, thinks like a real estate lawyer. Here’s a look at how we build and rigorously evaluate it:

We Built an AI Assistant That Thinks Like a Real Estate Lawyer — The evolution from classical ML to LLMs to AI Agents, and how we’re accelerating lawyers’ work by 70% (Andrew Thompson, CTO)

Real World Blind Evals — How we test new models against our production workloads before rolling them out to customers (Ben Sainsbury & Gus Levinson, Legal & AI Engineering)

Technical Deep Dives

We love sharing what we learn. These posts explore some of the technical approaches we’ve developed along the way:

Give Your LLM a Terminal — How giving language models access to tools like a terminal unlocks powerful agentic capabilities (Matt Westcott, VP of AI)

CTO’s Talk for AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025 — A conference talk on how we’ve built Orbital Copilot and the lessons learned along the way (Andrew Thompson, CTO)

Teaching AI to Read Property Boundaries — Building computational geometry systems that parse historical property descriptions (Andrei Vasilcoi, Tech Lead)

Life at Orbital

We’ve built a flexible, trust-based environment where people do their best work, grow their careers, and sometimes even go on to build their own companies:

From Orbital to YC — How working at Orbital prepared one of our AI Engineers to co-found a YC-backed startup (Gus Levinson, AI Engineer)

What is a Legal Engineer? — Follow a day in the life of a commercial property lawyer turned Legal Engineer, working at the intersection of law and AI (Tassneem Attia, Legal Engineer)

Flexible Working at Orbital — What “flexible working” actually means at our company—autonomy, trust, and putting customers first (Andrew Thompson, CTO)

Our Product Engineering Mantras — The principles that guide how we build: ship early, bet on the model, and more (Andrew Thompson, CTO)

Join Us

If these posts resonate with you, we’d love to hear from you. We’re always looking for people who want to solve hard problems at the intersection of AI and law and have fun doing it.

View Open Roles

Don’t see a perfect match? Feel free to connect with me directly on LinkedIn: Andrew Thompson. I’m always happy to chat over coffee or a video call—no pressure, just a conversation.