Senior Backend Engineer - Fulltime - Relocation to San Francisco

This is an onsite role based in San Francisco, US. We are open to international candidates who are open to relocating, and the company provides visa sponsorship and relocation support.

About ivo

Every civilization runs on the same infrastructure: agreements between people who don't fully trust each other. Sumerians pressed them into clay. Romans carved them into stone. We bury them in 80-page PDFs.

The way those agreements are reviewed hasn't changed in four thousand years - a human reads the whole thing and tries not to miss anything. We're building the AI that finally changes that.

We launched in early access in 2023. Since then, we’ve had an incredible response from the market and are growing rapidly. We 6x'd in ARR in the last 12 months. Our clients include companies like Uber, Reddit, IBM, Canva, Pinterest, WordPress, and more. We're happy to share more details with candidates who go through our interview process. We recently raised our Series B and have grown 800% over the last 12 months.

Engineering at Ivo

Engineers at Ivo are inventors. Ivo was first-to-market with:

• An AI agent that lives in MS word and edits the document for you [2023]
• Ditching imprecise embeddings models in favor of agentic RAG [2023]
• Large-scale LLM-based legal fact extraction [2024]
• A legal assistant that can search large contract databases, without sacrificing accuracy [2024]
• Clustering legal documents descended from the same family [2025]
• Automatic deviation analysis to locate buried risk in huge contract databases [2025]
• Merging contracts with their amendments to make a time series of “composite” contracts (a customer actually cried when we showed her this) [2025]

Role: Senior Backend Engineer

Our software solves all these problems (and more) at scale, and our Backend Engineers make it possible.
You’ll work on:
• Building systems that process and analyze millions of contracts reliably
• Designing pipelines that orchestrate LLMs, data extraction, and clustering algorithms at scale
• Creating the most accurate search and retrieval systems on the market
• Collaborating with lawyers and product to build the newly possible when LLMs change every few months

Compensation: The USD salary range for this role is $249K - $405K. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including, experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Work culture : We have an in-office culture, with some hybrid flexibility.

Mission

Every major business has an in-house legal team, and all of those lawyers are overworked. 80 hour weeks, tight deadlines and contract-reading death marches are the industry norm. Up until recently, there wasn’t anything technology could do to help this situation.

LLMs have given us the ability to give these lawyers their lives back, and at Ivo, that’s our mission.

We’re building an AI-native platform to automate legal drudgery. People love our software - despite high competition, we have the highest trial win rate on the market (85%). We’re genuinely improving people’s lives, and we’re only just getting started.

Ivo might be a good fit for you if you:

• You love writing code, but you love having impact more: We’re a team of engineers at heart, but our #1 goal is building the best possible product. That means making pragmatic choices and looking for 80/20 solutions.
• Would describe yourself as being relentlessly resourceful.
• You have a strong internal sense of urgency. You have a bias towards doing things today, rather than tomorrow.
• Experience working in a startup environment is preferred but not required.
• Are excited about the adventure of building a company