Hiring: Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Backend - West Palm Beach Company: Draftwise Location: West Palm Beach, FL Job Posted Time: 2026-09-11 13:31:03 Employment Type: Contract Target Skills & Keywords : API Design, AWS, LLM, OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, REST, React, SQL, TypeScript, Vault 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. •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. Qualifications: •Project or internship work on retrieval systems, evaluation harnesses, or agent frameworks. •Any experience in front of customers, including consulting, support, or solutions work. •Exposure to legal, financial, or other document heavy domains. •Anything you shipped to real users, personal projects included. •The real FDE experience. You will learn deployment and ontology work directly from engineers who did it at Palantir, alongside legal professionals from top global firms, and you will do the work rather than watch it. •Proven product market fit. Lawyers at Vault 10, Magic Circle, and Am Law 100 firms use Draftwise for their most important work, so you are building on demand that already exists. •Immediate feedback. Your work directly changes how legal professionals serve their clients, and you will often hear about the impact from the customer within days. •Ownership that compounds. Forward deployed work puts you in front of the customer, the commercial reality, and the code at the same time, which is rare this early in a career. It is the fastest way to become an engineer who can carry a problem end to end, and that travels with you wherever you go next, including a company of your own. •Early stage, real equity. You are joining at Series A, when the work you do still bends the company's trajectory, and every engineer holds a meaningful equity package, so you own a piece of what you build. •Intro call with the hiring manager. Compensation: •$120,000 - $150,000 / year 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!