Forward Deployed Engineer

Location: Menlo Park, CA (Hybrid)
Employment Type: Full-Time
Compensation: Competitive salary + equity

About Glade.ai

Glade builds AI-powered software for law firms — automating the most painful, high-stakes workflows in legal practice. Our clients depend on us every day for real casework: filings, case management, document generation, and the dozens of manual steps in between that attorneys and paralegals still do by hand.

The Opportunity

This is a highly agentic, client-facing engineering role at the intersection of deep technical work and client relationships. You'll write production code, deploy AI systems into live legal environments, and own client outcomes end-to-end. You're not a support function. You're not an implementation consultant. You're the engineer who makes Glade actually work — inside the firm, in the messiness of the real world, not just in a clean dev environment.

What You’ll Do

• Embed directly with law firm clients — sit with paralegals and attorneys, map their workflows, and figure out where the highest concentration of unsolved value lives before you write a line of code

• Own deployments end-to-end — from the first scoping conversation through go-live and production rollout, acting as the primary point of contact for the people who depend on the system daily

• Design and ship production AI systems — document generation agents, agentic workflows, automation pipelines — integrated into client environments and built to handle the edge cases of real legal work

• Build and evolve AI agents — prompt engineering, model integration, rapid prototyping with AI-assisted coding tools, and eval loops that measure quality against workflow-specific benchmarks

• Debug and resolve issues fast — in live client environments, with real stakes. You build diagnostic tools, ship fixes, and make sure things keep running

• Feed insights back to the product team — what you discover in the field shapes the roadmap. You're a core feedback loop between clients and what gets built next

• Capture best practices in internal playbooks to make every future deployment faster and smarter

• Move across the full stack — frontend, backend, whatever it takes to ship

What We’re Looking For

• Strong engineering fundamentals, comfortable in the field — we're a TypeScript / React / Node stack; you write real code and own it in production, and you're just as at ease in a standup with attorneys and paralegals as you are debugging a live case management environment

• Hands-on AI experience — prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, and deployment at scale — not just familiarity with the landscape. You want to deploy AI workers into real law firms and watch them transform how firms operate

• A 0-to-1 build track record — you've shipped production software in ambiguous environments, you write clean pragmatic code, and you don't let perfect get in the way of done. Our clients have real deadlines; so do we

• Exceptional communication — you can explain a model integration to a paralegal who's never heard of an API, earn their trust in the same conversation, and bring that same clarity back to the engineering team

How to stand out in this interview application process:

Put yourself in our shoes. We get over 300+ applicants / week. We want to spend time with the right candidates. During your interview process you will meet at least 3 other engineers and managers within Glade. So putting your best foot forward by building something unique is the fastest way to being the right candidate.

You are the right candidate if you:

• Solve a real or plausible problem for law firms, legal teams, or their clients.

• Demonstrate strong product judgment. We want to understand why you built what you built, the tradeoffs you considered, and how you decided what was worth prioritizing.

• Show thoughtful engineering. We care about architecture, state management, data modeling, edge cases, and how your solution could evolve as part of a production product.

• Present your work professionally. Please host it, share a repository, or provide a deployed link so we can evaluate not only the functionality, but also how you package, communicate, and ship your work.

You are welcome to use AI tools throughout the process—in fact, we expect great engineers to leverage them effectively. However, the final result should not feel like a generic AI-generated demo. It should reflect your taste, judgment, and ability to turn an ambiguous problem into a useful product.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salary + equity

• High-energy in-person culture with an office built for focus, fitness, and fun — gym, yoga studio, dog park, free EV charging, and regular in-office events included

• 🏥 Comprehensive healthcare

• 🍽 Lunch, snacks, and team outings

• 💻 Latest tech — and as many monitors as you can fit on a desk

• 🤖 AI tokens covered — use the tools that make you fast