Legal Engineer (Privacy & Compliance)

Wordsmith

Wordsmith is building the legal operating system for in-house teams, and we are growing fast.

We believe in-house legal is becoming one of the most important functions in the AI era. Every business is moving faster, but legal work is still too often scattered across inboxes, chats, documents and disconnected systems.

Wordsmith brings that work into one system. Requests come in from across the business, AI agents handle the routine, lawyers stay in control where judgement matters, and every step is captured as work happens.

We are built for in-house legal, not law firms. Our goal is to help legal teams move faster, reduce unnecessary external counsel spend and become a function the business can run with.

More than 500 companies, including Financial Times, Safelite, Trip.com, Canva, Starling and Sage, use Wordsmith. Backed by over $100M from Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Highland Europe and others, we are building one of the defining companies in legal AI.

The role

We're hiring a Legal Engineer to help build out privacy and compliance as a brand new product vertical for Wordsmith, from the ground up.

This role spans privacy and compliance more generally - building products for customers, supporting pre-sales, and creating the global AI tools that power them. Its centre of gravity is privacy and compliance, but with the scope to be involved in wider regulatory, governance and legal use-cases, so comfort and curiosity across these areas is a must.

Because this is a new product vertical for Wordsmith, we're seeking someone who is genuinely excited to build it out from scratch. This is a mid-to-senior role for someone who can work independently and with our Head of Privacy - scoping a problem, building the solution and standing in front of a customer without hand-holding.

What you'll do

• Build privacy and compliance products — translate messy legal, privacy and compliance requirements into structured, workable solutions that an AI agent can execute.
• Own the product vertical — shape privacy, compliance and beyond, as a brand new part of the Wordsmith platform, with real autonomy over how it's built.
• Support pre-sales — sit in front of customers, understand their problems, and build or demonstrate solutions that solve them.
• Apply the compliance landscape — bring privacy law knowledge and/or the wider regulatory, governanance and compliance landscape, (eg Financial Services compliance or AI Governance), to real customer problems.
• Extend into general legal work — build more general legal products when the work calls for it, beyond the core privacy and compliance focus.
• Build with AI, not code — use Wordsmith's own platform to build solutions, with no coding required, but a confident, hands-on understanding of what today's AI can and can't do.

What we're looking for

• Deep privacy and compliance knowledge, with a strong command of privacy law and/or the wider compliance picture — AI governance, security or specific areas such as financial regulation or employment law.
• Either a qualified lawyer or a privacy/compliance specialist with real depth in the field, comfortable working across adjacent legal areas when the work calls for it.
• Strong AI literacy — comfortable using and reasoning about AI tools day to day, with a clear understanding of what today's AI can and can't do, and able to build with it.
• A builder's mindset — able to take a messy legal, privacy or compliance requirement and turn it into something structured and workable.
• Client-facing confidence — able to sit in front of customers, understand their legal and compliance problems, and build or demonstrate solutions, including in pre- and post-sales settings.
• Several years of experience in privacy law or compliance practice, ideally at a mid-to-senior level, with the proactivity to work independently.

Desirable, but not essential

• Experience in legal tech, RegTech or a SaaS environment.
• Breadth across the compliance landscape, such as security frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2), AI governance regimes (EU AI Act) or broader GRC.
• Awareness of, or exposure to, broader legal practice beyond privacy and compliance.
• Some hands-on building experience — prompt design, workflow automation, low-code tools or similar.

How we work

We're an in-person team based in Edinburgh or London. You should expect to work from the office as your default.

We set a high bar, move quickly and give people meaningful ownership. You'll work closely with Sales, Product and Engineering as you build this vertical, with the autonomy to scope your own problems and build your own solutions.

Why Wordsmith

You'll be the first person building out privacy, compliance and regulatory as a product vertical at Wordsmith — a ground-floor opportunity to shape it from scratch, at one of the defining companies in legal AI.

Because we're building in a new technical category, the problems are interesting and genuinely unsolved. You'll have real autonomy over how this part of the platform is built, and the opportunity to grow it as it scales.