Hiring: Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Backend - New York Company: Draftwise Location: New York, NY Job Posted Time: 2026-09-11 18:06:15 Employment Type: Contract Target Skills & Keywords : AWS, HBase, LLM, Make, OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, RSpec, React, TypeScript, Vault, jQuery About the job Required Skills: •A Forward Deployed Engineer at Draftwise embeds with a firm, learns how their lawyers actually draft, and extends the product until it works the way they work. You will model their precedent and playbooks into our ontology and write the backend behind it, and when the platform cannot do what a firm needs, you build it. •This is the early career version of that job, weighted toward backend engineering and the AI systems underneath the product. You will 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. •The scope is broad. You get ownership and impact across the technology, the product, and our culture, working alongside a first rate engineering team to ship new features, scale the platform, and make it more performant. •What you will work on •Ontology modeling for legal knowledge. Every firm has its own precedent, playbooks, and preferred language, and the ontology is how we turn that into structure the product can reason over. This is the most transferable skill in the role. •Backend services behind drafting, review, and search. We are not religious about languages. There is what the codebase was historically built in and there is whatever gets the job done now, and the complexity that lasts sits underneath that: Postgres, OpenSearch, a graph database, and a wide set of AWS services. You will own features end to end and learn how those pieces fit together, which is rarer to pick up early than any one language. •LLM systems in production. You will write and test prompts, build retrieval and evaluation scaffolding, and measure quality on real customer data, so the work looks more like building test infrastructure than tuning prompts by feel. •Scale and performance. We run large documents and large precedent sets under interactive latency, so profiling, query tuning, and cost work show up as regular engineering here. •Deployments into elite law firms, with a senior FDE beside you. You will own pieces of a firm's rollout early, and you will be the one working out why their playbook does not map cleanly onto the product yet. •Enough frontend to finish the job. Our surface is a Word add in and a web app in TypeScript and React, and we expect you to ship a UI change without waiting on someone else. •What we are looking for •High ownership and low ego. Most of our work arrives as a customer problem instead of a spec, so we look for people who take it off someone else's plate, ask for feedback early, and do not care who gets credit for the fix. •A focus on user impact. We want someone with a passion for shipping high Compensation: •$135,000 •$175,000 •$20 Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!