Contract and negotiation AI built for lawyers. Backed by Index and Y Combinator.
About the role
A Forward Deployed Engineer at Draftwise embeds with a firm, learns how their lawyers actually draft, and extends the product until it works the way they work. You will model their precedent and playbooks into our ontology and write the backend behind it, and when the platform cannot do what a firm needs, you build it.
What they're 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
- 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
More about this role
Draftwise is a contract drafting, review, and negotiation AI powered by your legal knowledge. We turn a firm's guidance, precedent, and language into a legal ontology, ground our models in it, and run complex drafting, review, and search workflows directly within Microsoft Word and in the browser.
We serve top law firms and legal departments globally, including over half the Vault 10, dozens of Am Law 100 firms, and Fortune 500 organizations. We are headquartered in NYC with offices in London and West Palm Beach, are Y Combinator alumni, and raised a $20M Series A from Index Ventures.
A Forward Deployed Engineer at Draftwise embeds with a firm, learns how their lawyers actually draft, and extends the product until it works the way they work. You will model their precedent and playbooks into our ontology and write the backend behind it, and when the platform cannot do what a firm needs, you build it.
This is the early career version of that job, weighted toward backend engineering and the AI systems underneath the product. You will learn forward deployed engineering and ontology modeling from engineers who built those practices at Palantir, with real customer accounts and real code...
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