Staff Software Engineer

present of AI; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Ontra seeks a senior individual contributor to build AI features that read legal contracts, pull out obligations, and convert dense text into structured data. The role requires over a decade of engineering experience, strong product judgment, and the ability to shape what gets built and in what order.

Work spans architecture, cross-team leadership, and elevating engineering standards through reviews and tooling.

Qualifications

• Over a decade of engineering experience.
• Hands-on delivery of production LLM features.
• Ability to lead across teams and raise engineering standards.

Responsibilities

• Build AI features that read legal contracts and extract obligations.
• Turn dense legal text into structured data.
• Provide architectural guidance and cross-team leadership.
• Define quality metrics and evaluate AI outputs.

Skills

Engineering experience

LLM features

Cross-team leadership

Product judgment

Architectural judgment

Job description

This is a senior individual contributor role building AI features that read legal contracts, pull out obligations, and turn dense text into structured data. A strong candidate brings over a decade of engineering complex production systems, plus real product judgment to help decide what gets built and in what order. The work spans architecture, cross team leadership, and raising engineering standards through reviews and tooling.

How it fits the AI era

AI is central here, both in the products built and in how the engineer works day to day. The role calls for judging when AI output can be trusted and when it cannot, and for defining how quality gets measured. The human parts that remain are architectural judgment, product sense, and deciding where AI adds real value.

How it builds AI experience

The job offers hands on work shipping LLM features such as retrieval, agents, prompting, and evaluation, applied to contract markup and legal data extraction. Someone building toward this could practice with retrieval and agent patterns on messy documents and learn to design evaluation frameworks and reason about failure modes. Familiarity with legal or compliance text would help, given the company focus on private markets workflows.

Worth showing

• 10+ years engineering
• Production LLM features
• Cross team technical leadership

This is our own read, written from the employer's posting and the company's Spotlight. The employer's posting is the source of truth for the role.

About Ontra

Ontra provides AI-powered software and services that automate routine legal and compliance workflows for private markets firms, per the company.