Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Backend - West Palm Beach

Draftwise • West Palm Beach, FL

12d • $125,000 - $155,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Draftwise is a contract drafting, review, and negotiation AI powered by your legal knowledge. We turn a firm's guidance, precedent, and language into a legal ontology, ground our models in it, and run complex drafting, review, and search workflows directly within Microsoft Word and in the browser. We serve top law firms and legal departments globally, including over half the Vault 10, dozens of Am Law 100 firms, and Fortune 500 organizations. We are headquartered in NYC with offices in London and West Palm Beach, are Y Combinator alumni, and raised a $20M Series A from Index Ventures.

Requirements

• High ownership and low ego; take customer problems and solve them without concern for credit.
• Focus on user impact and shipping high-quality products that delight users.
• Curiosity and intelligence; ability to reason about data models, failure modes, and tradeoffs.
• Backend engineering as a center of gravity; comfort with SQL, API design, and debugging services.
• Comfort in customer-facing situations; ability to ask sharp questions and communicate needs clearly.
• Instinct to turn vague problems into models (schema, retrieval changes, bug fixes).
• Interest in LLMs and their limits; judgment to see where they help and where they cost time.
• Built real backend software; specific language experience is less important than foundational skills.
• Desire to get much better at SQL, API design, and debugging.

Nice To Haves

• Project or internship work on retrieval systems, evaluation harnesses, or agent frameworks.
• Experience in front of customers, including consulting, support, or solutions work.
• Exposure to legal, financial, or other document-heavy domains.
• Shipped anything to real users, including personal projects.

Responsibilities

• Embed with a firm, learn how their lawyers actually draft, and extend the product until it works the way they work.
• Model their precedent and playbooks into our ontology and write the backend behind it.
• Build features when the platform cannot do what a firm needs.
• Learn forward deployed engineering and ontology modeling from engineers who built those practices at Palantir, with real customer accounts and real code from your first month.
• Ship new features, scale the platform, and make it more performant.
• Ontology modeling for legal knowledge, turning firm precedent, playbooks, and preferred language into structure the product can reason over.
• Develop backend services behind drafting, review, and search, working with Postgres, OpenSearch, a graph database, and AWS services.
• Write and test prompts, build retrieval and evaluation scaffolding, and measure quality on real customer data for LLM systems in production.
• Focus on scale and performance, including profiling, query tuning, and cost optimization for large documents and precedent sets under interactive latency.
• Deploy into elite law firms, owning pieces of a firm's rollout early and resolving issues with playbook mapping.
• Make UI changes in the Word add-in and web app (TypeScript and React) as needed to complete features.

Benefits

• Learn deployment and ontology work directly from experienced engineers.
• Work with legal professionals from top global firms.
• Build on a product with proven market fit used by top law firms.
• Receive immediate feedback on work from customers.
• Gain ownership that compounds by being in front of the customer, commercial reality, and code.
• Fastest way to become an engineer who can carry a problem end to end.
• Early stage, real equity; meaningful equity package.
• Opportunity to bend the company's trajectory.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed