Engineer in Residence: Syntra

In-house legal teams are drowning in contract volume, compliance obligations, and cross-functional requests but legal headcount doesn't scale with company growth. This role is to build an AI-native general counsel product for SMBs: starting with contract review and clause extraction, and growing into the always-on legal operations layer that sits between operators and outside firms.

• A contract ingestion and parsing pipeline that handles PDFs, Word documents, and email attachments across varying formats and clause structures.
• A clause extraction and classification system that identifies key terms, obligations, risk provisions, and non-standard language with high precision.
• A risk scoring engine that flags contracts or clauses that deviate from company-approved templates or contain unusual terms.
• A workflow layer that routes flagged items to the right reviewer with context, reducing the time from contract receipt to approval.

• Design the document processing pipeline for handling the full diversity of enterprise contract formats.
• Build extraction models that identify and classify contract clauses with precision high enough for legal teams to trust.
• Develop a risk assessment framework that compares incoming contracts against company playbooks and approved clause libraries.
• Implement a review workflow that integrates with existing legal tools (CLMs, matter management systems, email).
• Work with in-house legal design partners to validate accuracy and build trust in AI-assisted contract review.

• Strong full‑stack or backend engineering skills. You have built and shipped production systems that process complex documents.
• Experience with document processing, NLP, or information extraction from unstructured text.
• Hands‑on experience building with LLMs, particularly for structured data extraction, classification, or reasoning tasks.
• Ability to build systems where precision matters. Legal teams need to trust the output, so false positive management is critical.
• Ability to work autonomously and make product and architecture decisions without waiting for direction.

• Experience in legal tech, compliance tech, or regulated industry software.
• Familiarity with contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools or legal workflow systems.
• Background in document AI, OCR, or PDF processing pipelines.
• Founder or founding engineer experience building for knowledge worker workflows.

• A builder who sees legal operations as a high-value, underserved vertical for applied AI.
• Someone who understands that the hardest part is not extraction but precision: legal teams will not use a tool that makes mistakes on important clauses.

• This is a 12‑week, full‑time, on‑site residency in Mountain View, California.
• Not every residency becomes a company. The goal is to pressure‑test the idea quickly and honestly with real users and customers.
• You will be building an AI Fund idea, not bringing your own startup idea into the program.
• The process typically includes a Builder Event or equivalent working conversation, then a 48‑hour Builder Challenge, then panel review with AI Fund build leadership.
• The compensation is intentionally modest during the residency because the upside, if the idea works, is a founder‑level role.

$10,000/month for 12 weeks ($30,000 total). This is a contract role during the residency. If the build leads to a funded company, the next step is a founder-level role with meaningful equity upside.