Director, Engineering - AI
About The Position
Ironclad is doubling down on AI to change how legal teams create, understand, and act on contracts. As Director of Intelligence Platform, you’ll lead the core AI capabilities behind our next generation of products—contract extraction and understanding, search and retrieval, agent frameworks and orchestration, and Ironclad Assistant. Your team owns the shared intelligence layer that powers every AI experience at Ironclad, enabling product teams to move faster with higher quality and consistency. You’ll define strategy, architecture, and execution for these foundational systems, then work hands-on with teams to turn them into durable product advantage: deeper contract understanding, more powerful search, trustworthy agentic workflows, and an assistant that helps customers move faster and make better decisions. This is a high-impact, highly visible role at the intersection of AI platform, applied ML, product engineering, and customer experience—ideal for a hands-on technical leader who wants to pair deep technical engagement with organizational leadership.
Requirements
- Deep experience building and scaling AI-powered products or platforms in production, ideally in complex, high-stakes domains (e.g., legaltech, enterprise SaaS, fintech, healthcare).
- Hands-on technical leader who stays close to architecture, design reviews, prototyping, and coding when it helps the team move faster.
- Strong architectural instincts and design systems that are practical, extensible, reliable, and aligned with business and customer needs.
- Experience leading teams working in several of the following areas: LLM- or ML-powered product systems, search, retrieval, and ranking, information extraction or document understanding, agentic workflows or orchestration frameworks, evaluation, experimentation, and model quality systems, production-grade backend, distributed systems, or AI infrastructure.
- Strong product judgment and connect technical decisions directly to differentiated customer value.
- Excellent cross-functional partner who can align engineering, product, and business stakeholders around a clear vision and execution plan.
- Ability to hire, develop, and empower strong engineers and technical leaders, and a track record of delivering through ambiguity and shaping strategy in fast-moving technical areas.
Nice To Haves
- Experience shipping customer-facing AI assistants, copilots, or agentic products and familiarity with LLM/agent evaluation systems (including human-in-the-loop and telemetry-driven feedback loops) are strong pluses.
Responsibilities
- Lead the strategy, roadmap, and execution for Ironclad’s Intelligence Platform, spanning: contract extraction and understanding, search and retrieval, agent framework and orchestration, Ironclad Assistant.
- Define and evolve the architecture for reusable AI capabilities used across multiple product areas.
- Partner with engineers on system design and technical direction, especially in ambiguous or high-leverage areas.
- Contribute hands-on through prototyping, technical exploration, and selective production implementation.
- Build and scale a high-performing team of engineers and technical leaders across AI platform and product domains.
- Guide product and platform decisions to improve quality, reliability, latency, observability, security, and cost for AI-powered experiences.
- Partner with Product, Design, Legal, Infrastructure, and other Engineering teams to translate customer needs into differentiated AI capabilities and products.
- Establish strong quality bars for AI systems, including evaluation, experimentation, telemetry, and feedback loops.
- Guide the evolution of Ironclad Assistant as a flagship AI product while ensuring its underlying capabilities are reusable across the platform.
- Help the company make thoughtful technical and product tradeoffs across LLMs, retrieval, agents, structured contract understanding, and workflow integration.
- Turn one-off solutions into shared platform capabilities, tools, and patterns that create leverage for other teams.
- Develop an effective team structure, ownership model, and execution cadence that enables rapid progress without sacrificing technical excellence.
Benefits
- 100% health coverage for employees (medical, dental, and vision), and 75% coverage for dependents with buy-up plan options available
- Market-leading leave policies, including gender-neutral parental leave and compassionate leave
- Family forming support through Maven for you and your partner
- Paid time off - take the time you need, when you need it
- Monthly stipends for wellbeing, hybrid work, and (if applicable) cell phone use
- Mental health support through Modern Health, including therapy, coaching, and digital tools
- Pre-tax commuter benefits (US Employees)
- 401(k) plan with Fidelity with employer match (US Employees)
- Regular team events to connect, recharge, and have fun
- Opportunity to help build the company you want to work at
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
