Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Backend

About the Role

A Forward Deployed Engineer at Draftwise embeds with a firm, learns how their lawyers actually draft, and extends the product until it works the way they work. This is the early career version of that job, weighted toward backend engineering and the AI systems underneath the product. You will learn forward deployed engineering and ontology modeling from engineers who built those practices at Palantir. The scope is broad, offering ownership and impact across the technology, the product, and the company culture, working alongside a first-rate engineering team to ship new features, scale the platform, and make it more performant.

What you will work on

• Ontology modeling for legal knowledge.
• Backend services behind drafting, review, and search, utilizing Postgres, OpenSearch, a graph database, and a wide set of AWS services.
• LLM systems in production, including writing and testing prompts, building retrieval and evaluation scaffolding, and measuring quality on real customer data.
• Scale and performance improvements, including profiling, query tuning, and cost optimization.
• Deployments into elite law firms, with a senior FDE beside you.
• Frontend development using TypeScript and React to complete the job.

What we are looking for

• High ownership and low ego.
• A focus on user impact and shipping high-quality products.
• Curiosity and intelligence over credentials.
• Backend as your center of gravity, with comfort in SQL, API design, and debugging services.
• Comfort in customer-facing interactions.
• The instinct to turn a vague problem into a model.
• Interest in LLMs and their limits, with judgment to see where they help and where they cost time.

You do not need legal industry experience, production LLM experience, or prior customer-facing work. The focus is on having built real backend software.

Nice to have

• Project or internship work on retrieval systems, evaluation harnesses, or agent frameworks.
• Any experience in front of customers.
• Exposure to legal, financial, or other document-heavy domains.
• Anything shipped to real users, personal projects included.

Process

• Intro call with the hiring manager.
• Technical conversation on a system you have built.
• Screen share coding exercises on backend, data modeling, debugging.
• Take-home project on a self-contained problem, using the stack and AI tools.
• Final conversation with a founder.