Senior/Staff AI Engineer

Ironclad is the leading AI-powered contract lifecycle management platform, processing billions of contracts every year.

Every business is powered by contracts, but managing them can slow companies down and cost millions of dollars. Global innovators like L’Oréal, OpenAI, and Salesforce trust Ironclad to transform contracting into a strategic advantage - accelerating revenue, reducing risk, and driving efficiency. It’s the only platform that manages every type of contract workflow, whether a sales agreement, an HR agreement or a complex NDA.

We’re building the future of intelligent contracting and writing the narrative for how contracts unlock strategic growth. Forrester Wave and Gartner Magic Quadrant have consistently recognized Ironclad as a leader in our category. We’ve also been named one of Fortune’s Great Places to Work six years running, featured on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work, and recognized by Forbes’ 50 Most Promising AI Companies.

We’re backed by leading investors like Accel, Sequoia, Y Combinator, and BOND. We’d love for you to join us!

AI Engineering @ Ironclad

Ironclad is accelerating its AI initiatives to transform how legal teams manage contracts. We're looking for a Senior or Staff AI/ML Engineer to help shape the future of legal AI. In this role, you’ll work with cutting-edge tools such as HuggingFace, OpenAI APIs, and Rivet to develop state-of-the-art models and intelligent systems that extract structured insights from contracts and power product features used by leading legal teams.

You’ll partner closely with product managers and designers to translate user needs into AI-powered product capabilities. You’ll also lead efforts in model evaluation, iteration, and deployment—ensuring our systems are robust, explainable, and continuously improving. As part of our end-to-end ownership model, you’ll contribute to the MLOps stack to ensure our models are scalable, reliable, and performant in production.

What you'll be doing:

• Build models and AI capabilities that ingest legal documents, extract key information, and deliver actionable insights to customers
• Lead the design and implementation of backend services that power document understanding, classification, and natural language search
• Explore and apply cutting-edge techniques in NLP, LLM integration, and semantic search to advance Ironclad’s AI/ML vision
• Design and maintain robust pipelines for model training, evaluation, and inference, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and observability
• Develop and scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and agent-based orchestration frameworks for complex legal workflows
• Help build foundational AI/ML infrastructure, including tools for experimentation, model versioning, and online/offline performance monitoring
• Partner closely with product managers and designers to shape user-facing AI experiences and deliver value through APIs and intelligent features
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of technical excellence, rapid experimentation, and product impact
• Own and maintain production systems, responding to high-priority issues (P0s) and resolving bugs as they arise

Required skills:

• BS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 3+ years of experience in training, evaluating, and serving machine learning models in production
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with Python, backend service development, and RESTful APIs
• 2+ years of experience in NLP techniques such as text classification, entity extraction, document understanding, or question answering
• Proficiency with deep learning frameworks and APIs (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, HuggingFace Transformers, OpenAI APIs, LangChain)
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Solid understanding of Git or other version control systems
• Strong engineering fundamentals and attention to code quality, testing, and maintainability
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Passion for building AI products that solve real-world customer problems

Nice to have:

• Experience working with large language models (e.g., GPT, Claude) or building RAG systems
• Experience with embedding models and vector databases
• Familiarity with Vertex AI or other managed ML platforms
• Experience working with PDF and DOCX parsing for document ingestion
• Comfort with Docker and containerized development
• Familiarity with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, CircleCI)
• Monitoring and observability with tools like Datadog or equivalent
• Experience with data processing and analysis using tools like SQL, Pandas, NumPy, or PySpark

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 Software Engineer: $160,000 - $175,000
• Staff Software Engineer: $190,000 - $210,000

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.

Compensation Range: $160K - $175K