Founding Engineer

About Contracts.ai

Contracts are the system of record for how an enterprise runs — but most companies have no way to operationalize what’s actually inside them. At Contracts.ai, we turn contracts into intelligence that aligns legal, finance, and sales operations with the terms they’ve agreed to.

Enterprises rely on us to extract, structure, and reconcile data across hundreds of thousands of contracts in real time. That means building fast, resilient, scalable systems that power critical business workflows.

Why This Role Is Exciting

This is a true zero-to-one engineering role with tremendous scope:

• You’re the first hire and will work directly with the founders.
• You’ll own major parts of our architecture and product surface area.
• You’ll design systems that handle massive contract volumes and real-time financial reconciliation.
• You’ll shape the engineering culture and raise the bar for every future hire.

If you want to build core infrastructure at scale while shaping the early DNA of a company — this is it.

What You’ll Build

You’ll work across our stack: Next.js/React frontend + Django/Postgres backend + LLM-powered contract intelligence.

You’ll tackle problems like:

• High-throughput ingestion of unstructured contract documents.
• LLM-driven extraction, semantic indexing, and metadata normalization.
• Real-time reconciliation workflows across tens of thousands of agreements.
• Building user interfaces that make complex legal/financial insights feel simple.
• Designing internal tools and pipelines for accuracy, evaluation, and continuous improvement.

This is both deep engineering and customer-facing product work — you’ll ship fast, iterate with users, and own things end-to-end.

What You’ll Do

• Obsess about user experience
• Architect and build core backend systems, APIs, and data pipelines in Django + Postgres.
• Contribute to and improve the Next.js/React frontend.
• Design scalable infrastructure for contract ingestion, processing, and reconciliation.
• Build and iterate on LLM extraction, embeddings, and retrieval workflows.
• Talk directly to customers (legal teams, finance leaders, operations teams) to deeply understand pain points.
• Establish engineering best practices, automation, and CI/CD from the ground up.
• Read the latest on AI/ML and incorporate the learnings into your work.
• Collaborate on product strategy and roadmap decisions.
• Help recruit the next wave of engineers.

Who You Are

• Obsessed about user experience and appreciate good UI/UX.
• 5+ years engineering experience shipping production-grade systems.
• A true full-stack generalist who’s comfortable in both React/Next.JS and Django.
• Strong intuition for system design, performance, and scaling data-heavy applications.
• Experience with AI/LLM tooling (or interest + ability to learn fast).
• Comfortable talking to customers and translating workflows into product features.
• Thrive in fast-paced, high-ambiguity startup environments.
• Low ego, high ownership.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Massive impact: you’ll define our architecture, culture, and product direction.
• The problems are genuinely hard and rewarding because contract intelligence touches legal, finance, billing, risk, operations, and revenue.
• You’ll see your work used immediately by enterprise customers operating at huge scale.
• $150k to $180k base + benefits + meaningful early equity.