Onsite AI Engineer for Legal Workflows and Ontology

Draftwise; New York (NY); On-site; USD 135,000 - 175,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

Series A impact

Job summary

Draftwise is seeking an early-career Forward Deployed AI Engineer to embed with a law firm and translate how lawyers draft into an ontology, then build the backend (and enough frontend) to extend the product so it operates the way the firm works. This role blends backend engineering with production AI systems, applied directly in real customer environments, with onsite work at our New York office.

You'll own features end to end, including modeling a firm's precedent, writing tests, and

Qualifications

• Backend-focused role with SQL, API design, and debugging skills.
• Comfort in working closely with customers to gather precise requirements.
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems into models for AI systems.
• Interest in LLMs and understanding their limits.
• High ownership and low ego with strong problem-solving.

Responsibilities

• Model a firm's precedent into an ontology and implement the backend.
• Embed with the firm to learn how lawyers draft, then extend the product until it aligns with their workflows.
• Own features end to end, including understanding how the pieces work together.
• Write and test prompts, build retrieval and evaluation scaffolding.
• Profile, query tuning, and cost-related work for scale and performance.
• Lead early rollout pieces and investigate why a playbook does not map cleanly onto the product.
• Ship UI changes without waiting on others.

Skills

SQL

API design

Debugging services

Customer-facing

Problem modeling

LLMs

Ownership

Tools

Postgres

OpenSearch

Graph database

AWS

TypeScript

React

Claude Code

Job description

Draftwise is seeking an early-career Forward Deployed AI Engineer to embed with a law firm and translate how lawyers draft into an ontology, then build the backend (and enough frontend) to extend the product so it operates the way the firm works. This role blends backend engineering with production AI systems, applied directly in real customer environments, with onsite work at our New York office.

You'll own features end to end, including modeling a firm's precedent, writing tests, and