Senior/Staff AI Engineer

Ironclad Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Ironclad Inc. is seeking a Senior or Staff AI/ML Engineer in San Francisco to drive innovative AI solutions for legal teams. The ideal candidate will develop AI models for document understanding and classification, collaborating closely with product teams to enhance user experience. A strong background in NLP and experience with machine learning frameworks are required.

Benefits

Health, dental, and vision insurance

401k

Wellness reimbursement

Take what you need vacation policy

Generous parental leave

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in training and serving machine learning models.
• 2+ years experience in NLP techniques.
• Experience with cloud platforms is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Build AI capabilities to extract insights from legal documents.
• Lead backend services for document understanding.
• Design robust pipelines for model training and evaluation.

Skills

Python

NLP

RESTful APIs

Deep Learning

Git

Communication

Collaboration

Education

BS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

HuggingFace

Cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure)

Job description

Ironclad is the #1 contract lifecycle management platform for innovative companies. Every company, in every country, in every industry runs on contracts, but managing these contracts slows companies down and costs them millions of dollars. L’Oréal, Staples, Mastercard, and other leading innovators use Ironclad to collaborate and negotiate on contracts, accelerate contracting while maintaining compliance, and turn contracts into critical carriers of operational business intelligence. It’s the only platform flexible enough to handle every type of contract workflow, whether a sales agreement, an HR agreement or a complex NDA.

Ironclad is writing the narrative that shows how beautiful and functional contracting will change business. We’re a leader in the Forrester Wave for Contract Lifecycle Management. We have been recognized as a Fortune Great Place to Work for four consecutive years. Our innovation and work culture have been recognized by Glassdoor's Best Places to Work 2023, Forbes’ 50 Most Promising AI Companies, Wing Venture Capital's Enterprise Tech 30, and Gartner's Magic Quadrant. We work in a highly collaborative environment, and strive to foster a positive, inclusive culture. We’re backed by leading investors like Accel, Y Combinator, Sequoia, and BOND. For more information, visit www.ironcladapp.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

AI Engineering @ Ironclad

Ironclad is accelerating its AI initiatives to transform how legal teams manage contracts. We're looking for a Senior or Staff AI/ML Engineer to help shape the future of legal AI. In this role, you’ll work with cutting-edge tools such as HuggingFace, OpenAI APIs, and Rivet to develop state-of-the-art models and intelligent systems that extract structured insights from contracts and power product features used by leading legal teams.

You’ll partner closely with product managers and designers to translate user needs into AI-powered product capabilities. You’ll also lead efforts in model evaluation, iteration, and deployment—ensuring our systems are robust, explainable, and continuously improving. As part of our end-to-end ownership model, you’ll contribute to the MLOps stack to ensure our models are scalable, reliable, and performant in production.

What you'll be doing:

• Build models and AI capabilities that ingest legal documents, extract key information, and deliver actionable insights to customers

• Lead the design and implementation of backend services that power document understanding, classification, and natural language search

• Explore and apply cutting-edge techniques in NLP, LLM integration, and semantic search to advance Ironclad’s AI/ML vision

• Design and maintain robust pipelines for model training, evaluation, and inference, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and observability

• Develop and scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and agent-based orchestration frameworks for complex legal workflows

• Help build foundational AI/ML infrastructure, including tools for experimentation, model versioning, and online/offline performance monitoring

• Partner closely with product managers and designers to shape user-facing AI experiences and deliver value through APIs and intelligent features

• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of technical excellence, rapid experimentation, and product impact

• Own and maintain production systems, responding to high-priority issues (P0s) and resolving bugs as they arise

Required skills:

• BS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

• 3+ years of experience in training, evaluating, and serving machine learning models in production

• 3+ years of hands-on experience with Python, backend service development, and RESTful APIs

• 2+ years of experience in NLP techniques such as text classification, entity extraction, document understanding, or question answering

• Proficiency with deep learning frameworks and APIs (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, HuggingFace Transformers, OpenAI APIs, LangChain)

• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure)

• Solid understanding of Git or other version control systems

• Strong engineering fundamentals and attention to code quality, testing, and maintainability

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

• Passion for building AI products that solve real-world customer problems

Nice to have:

• Experience working with large language models (e.g., GPT, Claude) or building RAG systems

• Experience with embedding models and vector databases

• Familiarity with Vertex AI or other managed ML platforms

• Experience working with PDF and DOCX parsing for document ingestion

• Comfort with Docker and containerized development

• Familiarity with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, CircleCI)

• Monitoring and observability with tools like Datadog or equivalent

• Experience with data processing and analysis using tools like SQL, Pandas, NumPy, or PySpark

Benefits:

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• 401k

• Wellness reimbursement

• Take what you need vacation policy

• Generous parental leave for both primary and secondary caregivers

Base Salary Range:

• Senior Software Engineer: $160,000 - $175,000

• Staff Software Engineer: $190,000 - $210,000

The base salary range represents the minimum and maximum of the salary range for this position based at our San Francisco headquarters. The actual base salary offered for this position will depend on numerous factors, including individual proficiency, anticipated performance, and the location of the selected candidate. Our base salary is just one component of Ironclad’s competitive total rewards package, which also includes equity awards (a new hire grant, along with opportunities for additional awards throughout your tenure), competitive health and wellness benefits, and a commitment to career growth and development.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.