Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Backend

About Draftwise

Draftwise is an AI-powered contract drafting, review, and negotiation tool that leverages your legal knowledge. We transform firm guidance, precedent, and language into a legal ontology, grounding our models and running complex workflows within Microsoft Word and the browser. We serve top global law firms and legal departments, including Vault 10, Am Law 100 firms, and Fortune 500 organizations. Draftwise is headquartered in NYC, with offices in London and West Palm Beach. We are Y Combinator alumni and raised a $20M Series A from Index Ventures.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Draftwise, you will embed with a firm, understand how lawyers draft, and extend the product to align with their workflows. You will model firm precedents and playbooks into our ontology, develop the backend systems, and build new functionality when the platform's existing capabilities are insufficient. This is an early career role with a focus on backend engineering and the underlying AI systems. You will gain experience in forward deployed engineering and ontology modeling from engineers who previously developed these practices at Palantir, working with real customer accounts and code from your first month. The role offers broad scope, ownership, and impact across technology, product, and culture, collaborating with a first-rate engineering team to ship features, scale the platform, and enhance performance.

What You Will Work On

• Ontology modeling for legal knowledge, translating firm-specific precedents, playbooks, and language into structured data for product reasoning.
• Backend services for drafting, review, and search, working with technologies including Postgres, OpenSearch, a graph database, and a range of AWS services. You will own features end-to-end.
• LLM systems in production, including prompt writing and testing, retrieval and evaluation scaffolding, and quality measurement on customer data.
• Scale and performance optimization, including profiling, query tuning, and cost management for interactive latency with large documents and precedent sets.
• Deployments into elite law firms, with a senior FDE providing guidance, and taking ownership of parts of firm rollouts.
• Frontend development to complete tasks, working with TypeScript and React for the Word add-in and web app.

What We Are Looking For

• High ownership and low ego: Ability to take on customer problems, seek early feedback, and prioritize solutions over credit.
• Focus on user impact: Passion for shipping high-quality products that improve user efficiency, such as enabling lawyers to finish markups faster.
• Curiosity and intelligence over credentials: Strong reasoning skills in data modeling, failure modes, and tradeoffs, with an eagerness to learn in unfamiliar domains.
• Backend as your center of gravity: Comfort with SQL, API design, and debugging services you did not write, with a desire to improve in these areas.
• Comfort with customers: Ability to engage with partners and knowledge management leads, ask sharp questions, and clearly communicate information needs.
• Instinct to turn vague problems into models: Skill in translating lawyers' descriptions of work challenges into actionable schema, retrieval changes, or bug fixes.
• Interest in LLMs and their limits: Judgment to effectively apply LLMs like Claude Code and understand their operational implications.

No legal industry experience, production LLM experience, or prior customer-facing work is required. We value the foundation and curiosity you bring, as we will provide training on the rest.

Nice to Have

• Project or internship work on retrieval systems, evaluation harnesses, or agent frameworks.
• Any customer-facing experience, including consulting, support, or solutions work.
• Exposure to legal, financial, or other document-heavy domains.
• Shipped work to real users, including personal projects.

Why This Role

• Real FDE experience: Learn deployment and ontology work directly from experienced engineers, working alongside legal professionals from top global firms.
• Proven product-market fit: Build on existing demand from lawyers at leading firms using Draftwise for critical work.
• Immediate feedback: Your work directly impacts legal professionals, with frequent customer feedback on its effectiveness.
• Ownership that compounds: Gain rapid growth by engaging with customers, commercial realities, and code simultaneously, becoming an end-to-end problem solver.
• Early stage, real equity: Join at Series A with the opportunity to influence the company's trajectory and hold a meaningful equity package.

Process

• Intro call with the hiring manager.
• Technical conversation on a system you have built.
• Screen share coding exercises (backend, data modeling, debugging).
• Take-home project (approx. 3 hours) using the company's stack and AI tools.
• Final conversation with a founder.