Staff Software Engineer, AI - Elite Squad Team (San Francisco)

Ironclad is the leading AI contracting platform that transforms agreements into assets. Contracts move faster, insights surface instantly, and agents push work forward, all with you in control. Whether you’re buying or selling, Ironclad unifies the entire process on one intelligent platform, providing leaders with the visibility they need to stay one step ahead. That’s why the world’s most transformative organizations, from OpenAI to the World Health Organization and the Associated Press, trust Ironclad to accelerate their business.

We’re consistently recognized as a leader in the industry: a Leader in the Forrester Wave and Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contract Lifecycle Management, a Fortune Great Place to Work, and one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Workplaces. Ironclad has also been named to Forbes’ AI 50 and Business Insider’s list of Companies to Bet Your Career On. We’re backed by leading investors including Accel, Y Combinator, Sequoia, BOND, and Franklin Templeton. For more information, visit or follow us on LinkedIn.

AI Engineering @ Ironclad

Ironclad is accelerating its AI initiatives to transform how contracts are built, managed, and executed across an organization. We’re looking for a Generative AI Application Developer to rapidly build and deploy high-impact legal AI product features.

In this role, you are the expert AI feature developer who leverages our existing AI platform. You establish a Prompt Strategy, utilizing established Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) services and Large Language Model (LLM) APIs to develop intelligent product capabilities, like summarization or redlining.

You will partner closely with product managers and designers to translate user needs into production-ready LLM application logic. Your success will be measured by your ability to design the optimal context input and craft effective prompts to maximize the accuracy, relevance, latency and reliability of the final user-facing feature.

What you’ll be doing:

• Full Stack Development: Lead the design, development, and deployment of features from end-to-end using TypeScript, Node.js, React, and PostgreSQL , ensuring high performance and availability.

• Build Production AI Features: Be a primary contributor to the next generation of AI-powered legal features, including specialized summarization, drafting, editing, and document comparison functionalities utilizing LLMs.

• Architect Highly Scalable AI Products: Build and maintain reliable, highly scalable software and services designed for a high-traffic SaaS environment.

• Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate closely with Product Managers, UX Designers, and QE counterparts to rapidly prototype, iterate on designs, and make frequent, agile pivots based on user feedback.

• Advocate for the Customer: Maintain a high degree of customer empathy , ensuring technical decisions prioritize user experience and directly address customer pain points, creating measurable product impact.

• Deliver and Optimize AI Infrastructure: Work with platform teams to consume and manage internal LLM APIs, ensuring resilient connections and efficient token usage to meet strict latency targets.

Required Skills:

• Full-Stack Expertise: Deep professional experience with the core tech stack: TypeScript, Node.js, React, and PostgreSQL .

• High-Scale SaaS Experience: Proven track record of building, deploying, and maintaining reliable, highly scalable software for SaaS applications.

• LLM Consumption and Integration: Extensive experience consuming LLMs via APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Gemini, or proprietary models) and integrating them successfully into production-facing features.

• AI Feature Implementation: Practical experience building and shipping accurate and successful AI features or products, such as chatbots, summarization, drafting, or document editing/comparison using LLMs, RAGs, and the right context for LLM calls.

• Analytics, Monitoring and Observability: Experience with making data driven decisions, based on product analytics and have experience using monitoring and observability tools like Datadog or equivalent to diagnose performance issues and ensure system health.

• Agile and Impact-Driven: Highly agile mindset with proven ability to work effectively in 0-to-1 setups , frequently make pivots, and translate ambiguity into concrete, impactful engineering work.

• Collaboration and Communication: Exceptional skills as a great collaborator with product, design, and QE teams, acting as a clear technical voice for customer-centric solutions.

Nice to Have Skills:

• AI Evaluation Experience: Experience building automated evaluation pipelines and defining technical metrics (e.g., faithfulness, groundedness) to measure the quality of various AI features.

• Cloud Administration (GCP/Azure/AWS): Hands-on experience with managing infrastructure or administrative tasks on major cloud providers like GCP, Azure, or AWS .

• Legal Tech Domain: Prior experience in Legal Tech or other high-stakes domains (FinTech, HealthTech) where data accuracy and auditability are paramount.

• Document Processing: Experience working with PDF and DOCX parsing for document ingestion

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

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: $180,000 - $200,000

Base Salary Range - Staff: $210,000 - $235,000

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.