Forward-Deployed AI Engineer (Backend & Ontology)

S27a; West Palm Beach (FL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Draftwise is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with a law firm, learning their drafting practices, and extending the product to meet real-world needs. You will model precedent and write backend code that powers ontology, retrieval, and AI systems, with early exposure to production-grade LLM workloads.

You’ll own features end-to-end—from data modeling and API design to performance tuning—while collaborating with senior engineers and legal professionals in West Palm Beach, supporting

Qualifications

• High ownership and low ego; take ownership of customer problems and fixes.
• Curiosity and intelligence over credentials; willingness to learn unfamiliar domains.
• Backend engineering focus with comfort in SQL, API design, and debugging a service you didn’t write.
• Experience with large language models and production systems is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Ontology modeling for legal knowledge and precedent.
• Backend services behind drafting, review, and search (Postgres, OpenSearch, graph DB, AWS).
• LLM systems in production: prompts, retrieval, evaluation scaffolding.
• Scale and performance: latency, profiling, and cost work.
• Deployments into elite law firms with senior FDE guidance.
• Frontend exposure: minimal UI in TypeScript/React.

Skills

Ownership

Curiosity

Backend engineering

SQL

API design

Debugging

LLMs

Tools

Postgres

OpenSearch

Graph DB

AWS

Job description

Draftwise is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with a law firm, learning their drafting practices, and extending the product to meet real-world needs. You will model precedent and write backend code that powers ontology, retrieval, and AI systems, with early exposure to production-grade LLM workloads.

You’ll own features end-to-end—from data modeling and API design to performance tuning—while collaborating with senior engineers and legal professionals in West Palm Beach, supporting