Staff Software Engineer, Ironclad
AI, Elite Squad Team
$210-260k
Plus equity
Enterprise software for managing contracts
Open for applications
Enterprise software for managing contracts
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
$210-260k
Plus equity
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To power the world’s contracts.
Role
Who you are
- You should be excited about ambiguity, energized by fast context switching, and motivated by building real products that deliver customer value quickly
- This role is ideal for a high-agency builder who combines strong technical depth with product sense, urgency, and excellent judgment
- Significant experience building and shipping production software in fast-paced environments
- A strong track record of leading ambiguous, cross-functional efforts and turning them into concrete outcomes
- High agency and ownership: you see gaps, form a point of view, and drive things forward
- Strong bias to action, with the ability to balance speed and quality
- Excellent collaboration skills and low ego; you work well by influence, not just authority
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, especially in backend systems and distributed systems
- Ability to learn unfamiliar systems quickly and be productive in codebases you did not originally build
- Experience building AI-powered product features, platforms, or internal developer systems
- Familiarity with modern LLM application patterns such as agentic workflows, retrieval, evals, tool use, and quality/error analysis
- Comfort using AI coding tools to accelerate development, while maintaining engineering rigor and sound judgment
- Strong product instinct and customer empathy
- You care not just about whether a system works, but whether it solves an important user problem
- Excitement about iterating quickly, learning from real usage, and improving product quality over time
- This role is a great fit for someone who loves operating like a founder inside a company: moving quickly, solving hard problems, and creating leverage wherever it matters most
What the job involves
- We are building a new elite Squad Team: a small, high-leverage engineering group focused on fast-moving, high-priority AI initiatives across Ironclad
- This is not a traditional team tied to one surface area for years. Instead, the Squad Team is designed to move quickly across product and platform boundaries: incubating new AI capabilities, accelerating strategic bets, unblocking critical delivery gaps, and helping bring promising ideas from concept to production
- As a Staff Software Engineer on the Squad Team, you will be one of the technical anchors for this effort, and report to VP Engineering of AI. You will work across multiple codebases (including starting new ones) and domains, partner closely with product and engineering leaders, and help us execute some of the company’s most important AI initiatives
- Lead the design and delivery of high-priority AI initiatives across Ironclad, from early prototype through production launch
- Rapidly ramp into new systems, codebases, and problem areas, and drive execution with minimal hand-holding
- Incubate new product ideas in areas such as contract AI, agentic workflows, intelligent extraction, search, and automation
- Partner closely with product, design, legal domain experts, and go-to-market teams to turn customer needs into shipped product
- Raise the engineering bar through strong technical judgment, crisp execution, and pragmatic use of AI-assisted development tools
- Identify organizational or technical bottlenecks and help close them, whether by building, debugging, simplifying, or unblocking teams
- Mentor other engineers through hands-on leadership, code reviews, technical direction, and example-setting
- Help shape how Ironclad builds with modern AI systems, including evals, orchestration, prompting, retrieval, and production quality standards
- The Squad Team is meant to be a force multiplier for the organization. You won’t be limited to one narrow lane. You’ll help us:
- Incubate new AI product bets
- Accelerate critical initiatives
- Fill execution gaps where speed and technical depth matter most
- Bring strong engineering craftsmanship to the company’s most strategic work
- We believe in technical leaders who stay close to the work. This role is highly hands-on. You will spend most of your time building, designing, debugging, and driving execution, while also mentoring others and helping shape technical direction
- Our stack includes TypeScript, React, Node.js, and cloud-native infrastructure. Experience with the exact stack is less important than your ability to learn quickly, operate across systems, and ship high-quality work
- In this role, success means you:
- Help launch meaningful new AI capabilities faster
- Unblock important initiatives across teams
- Elevate execution quality wherever you engage
- Become a trusted technical leader for high-priority, cross-cutting work
- Help Ironclad build durable advantage in contract AI
Our take
Business contracting is often inefficient and messy, with approvals required from various stakeholders and many processes still paper-based. Ironclad is a platform that digitises, automates, and streamlines contract workflows, allowing legal teams to focus on legal work rather than paperwork. Its platform features collaborative tools that facilitate business operations and extract and catalogue contract metadata, making information easier to access and act upon. Its enterprise customers include Dropbox, Mastercard, Pixar, Fox, and L’Oréal.
Despite its success, Ironclad faces competition in the $3 billion contract lifecycle management industry from major players like DocuSign and emerging ones like Contractbook. The company recently announced Ironclad Signature, marking its entry into the $25 billion eSignature market. The new feature speeds up the signature process by an estimated 80% and provides summaries and approval histories to users. This new tool is expected to strengthen Ironclad's position in the sell-side contract lifecycle management market.
Additionally, Ironclad introduced value-based pricing, charging only for completed, signed agreements, unlike other providers who charge for every signature packet sent out. Ironclad, backed by investors like Accel, Sequoia, Y Combinator, and BOND, remains committed to innovating and maintaining its leadership in the contract lifecycle management space.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-3% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jan 2022
$150m
SERIES E
Dec 2020
$100m
SERIES D
Total funding: $334.3m
Company benefits
- Dental, and vision insurance
- 401K
- Wellness reimbursement
- Flexible vacation policy
- Generous parental leave for both primary and secondary caregivers
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
Company HQ
South Beach, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Cai GoGwilt
(Co-Founder & Chief Architect)Studied HSPS at Cambridge, and Computer Science at MIT. Was a Summer Technology Analayst at Goldman Sachs. Worked as a Research Assistant at MIT. Was a Software Engineer at Palantir.
Jason Boehmig
(Co-Founder & Executive Chairman)Former Corporate Lawyer at Fenwick and Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame before founding Ironclad in 2014.
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