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Draftwise is an AI-powered contract drafting, review, and negotiation platform used by top law firms and legal departments globally, including over half the Vault 10 and dozens of Am Law 100 firms. The company is Y Combinator alumni, headquartered in NYC with offices in London and West Palm Beach, and raised a $20M Series A from Index Ventures.
As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer (Backend), you will embed with client firms to understand how their lawyers work and extend the product to match their workflows. You'll model their precedent and playbooks into the company's legal ontology and write the backend systems that power it. This role is weighted toward backend engineering and AI systems, offering early-career engineers the opportunity to learn forward deployed engineering from engineers who built those practices at Palantir.
Key responsibilities include: ontology modeling for legal knowledge (turning firm-specific precedent and language into structured data the product can reason over); building backend services for drafting, review, and search using Postgres, OpenSearch, graph databases, and AWS services; implementing LLM systems in production with prompt writing, retrieval scaffolding, and quality measurement on real customer data; optimizing for scale and performance under interactive latency; owning pieces of firm rollouts and troubleshooting playbook-to-product mapping; and shipping UI changes in TypeScript/React when needed to complete features.
You should have high ownership and low ego, a focus on user impact, and curiosity over credentials. Backend should be your center of gravity—you should be comfortable with SQL, API design, and debugging unfamiliar services. You'll work directly with customers (partners and knowledge management leads) and need the instinct to translate vague legal problems into data models and technical solutions. Interest in LLMs and their limits is important; judgment about where they help versus where they cost time matters more than production LLM experience.
No legal industry experience, production LLM background, or prior customer-facing work is required. Nice-to-haves include retrieval systems, evaluation harnesses, agent frameworks, consulting/support/solutions experience, exposure to document-heavy domains, and shipped personal projects.
This role offers real forward-deployed experience learning from Palantir veterans, proven product-market fit with immediate customer feedback, and ownership that compounds—you'll see the impact of your work within days and develop end-to-end problem-solving skills that travel with you throughout your career.
