Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Backend - New York

What we are looking for

• High ownership and low ego. Most of our work arrives as a customer problem instead of a spec, so we look for people who take it off someone else's plate, ask for feedback early, and do not care who gets credit for the fix.

• A focus on user impact. We want someone with a passion for shipping high quality products that delight users, which here means a lawyer finishing a markup faster and noticing why.

• Curiosity and intelligence over credentials. We hire on how you reason about data models, failure modes, and tradeoffs, and you will be in unfamiliar territory often, legal concepts, an ontology, a service someone else wrote, so the learning has to be part of the appeal.

• Backend as your center of gravity. You should already be comfortable with SQL, API design, and debugging a service you did not write, and you should want to get much better at all three.

• Comfort in the room with the customer. You will be on calls with partners and knowledge management leads, prepared alongside a senior FDE, and the skill is asking a sharp question and saying plainly what you still need to go find out.

• The instinct to turn a vague problem into a model. Lawyers describe problems in terms of their work, and the job is to hear "our fallbacks never come out right" and get to a schema, a retrieval change, or a bug.

• Interest in LLMs and their limits. We use Claude Code and similar tools every day, and what matters is the judgment to see where they help and where they quietly cost you time.

You do not need legal industry experience, production LLM experience, or prior customer facing work, and we care that you have built real backend software rather than which language you built it in. Bring the foundation and the curiosity, and we will teach you the rest.

Nice to have

• 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.

Why this role

• 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.

Process

• Intro call with the hiring manager.

• Technical conversation on a system you have built.

• screen share coding exercises of about an hour on backend, data modeling, debugging

• Take-home project of about 3 hours on a self contained problem, using our stack and the AI tools you would use on the job. We share the rate and the evaluation criteria in advance.

• Final conversation with a founder.

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.