Forward Deployed Engineer

Glade • Menlo Park, CA

8d • Hybrid

About The Position

Forward Deployed Engineer Location: Menlo Park, CA (Hybrid) Employment Type: Full-Time Compensation: Competitive salary + equity About Glade.ai Glade builds AI-powered software for law firms — automating the most painful, high-stakes workflows in legal practice. Our clients depend on us every day for real casework: filings, case management, document generation, and the dozens of manual steps in between that attorneys and paralegals still do by hand. The Opportunity This is a highly agentic, client-facing engineering role at the intersection of deep technical work and client relationships. You'll write production code, deploy AI systems into live legal environments, and own client outcomes end-to-end. You're not a support function. You're not an implementation consultant. You're the engineer who makes Glade actually work — inside the firm, in the messiness of the real world, not just in a clean dev environment.

Requirements

• Strong engineering fundamentals, comfortable in the field — we're a TypeScript / React / Node stack; you write real code and own it in production, and you're just as at ease in a standup with attorneys and paralegals as you are debugging a live case management environment
• Hands-on AI experience — prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale — not just familiarity with the landscape. You want to deploy AI workers into real law firms and watch them transform how firms operate
• A 0-to-1 build track record — you've shipped production software in ambiguous environments, you write clean pragmatic code, and you don't let perfect get in the way of done. Our clients have real deadlines; so do we
• Exceptional communication — you can explain a model integration to a paralegal who's never heard of an API, earn their trust in the same conversation, and bring that same clarity back to the engineering team

Nice To Haves

• Solve a real or plausible problem for law firms, legal teams, or their clients.
• Demonstrate strong product judgment. We want to understand why you built what you built, the tradeoffs you considered, and how you decided what was worth prioritizing.
• Show thoughtful engineering. We care about architecture, state management, data modeling, edge cases, and how your solution could evolve as part of a production product.
• Present your work professionally. Please host it, share a repository, or provide a deployed link so we can evaluate not only the functionality, but also how you package, communicate, and ship your work.
• You are welcome to use AI tools throughout the process—in fact, we expect great engineers to leverage them effectively. However, the final result should not feel like a generic AI-generated demo. It should reflect your taste, judgment, and ability to turn an ambiguous problem into a useful product.

Responsibilities

• Embed directly with law firm clients — sit with paralegals and attorneys, map their workflows, and figure out where the highest concentration of unsolved value lives before you write a line of code
• Own deployments end-to-end — from the first scoping conversation through go-live and production rollout, acting as the primary point of contact for the people who depend on the system daily
• Design and ship production AI systems — document generation agents, agentic workflows, automation pipelines — integrated into client environments and built to handle the edge cases of real legal work
• Build and evolve AI agents — prompt engineering, model integration, rapid prototyping with AI-assisted coding tools, and eval loops that measure quality against workflow-specific benchmarks
• Debug and resolve issues fast — in live client environments, with real stakes. You build diagnostic tools, ship fixes, and make sure things keep running
• Feed insights back to the product team — what you discover in the field shapes the roadmap. You're a core feedback loop between clients and what gets built next
• Capture best practices in internal playbooks to make every future deployment faster and smarter
• Move across the full stack — frontend, backend, whatever it takes to ship

Benefits

• Competitive salary + equity
• High-energy in-person culture with an office built for focus, fitness, and fun — gym, yoga studio, dog park, free EV charging, and regular in-office events included
• Comprehensive healthcare
• Lunch, snacks, and team outings
• Latest tech — and as many monitors as you can fit on a desk
• AI tokens covered — use the tools that make you fast

What This Job Offers

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