--- title: 'Legal Engineer (Privacy & Compliance) at Wordsmith AI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/legal-engineer-privacy-compliance-wordsmith-ai-edinburgh-hxh477df6saa' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-04' --- # Legal Engineer (Privacy & Compliance) at Wordsmith AI - **Company:** Wordsmith AI - **Location:** Edinburgh, United Kingdom - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-09-03 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/wordsmith/d0a73507-0e43-4d97-be03-8d3333cae0f7 ## Job description ## 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 http://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. ## About Wordsmith AI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Wordsmith provides an AI-native legal operations platform that captures, triages, resolves, and records every legal request from the business, enabling in-house legal teams to work at the speed of AI. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B) - **Headquarters**: London, England, United Kingdom - **Founded**: 2023 - **Founders**: Ross McNairn (CEO), Volodymyr Giginiak (CTO), Robbie Falkenthal (COO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Legal Technology (LegalTech), Enterprise AI, Workflow Automation - **Target customers**: In-house legal departments at mid-to-large enterprises across all industries (B2B, Enterprise) - **Mission or purpose statement**: To be the Northstar for legal intelligence in business — to bring the legal function in-house by making it measurable, compressible, and owned, just as every other major corporate cost centre has been. ## Products & Services - **The Wordsmith Platform (Legal Operations System)**: An end-to-end AI-native system built around four core workflows: **Receive** (captures legal requests from Slack, email, Salesforce, Teams, and procurement systems), **Route** (assigns ownership, priority, and context), **Resolve** (automates routine legal work using AI agents — drafting, redlining, research, translation — while escalating complex decisions to lawyers), and **Record** (logs every decision, action, and rationale in real time for audit-ready governance). - **Contract Review & Workflow Integration**: End-to-end contract review embedded directly into business tools like Slack, Gmail, and procurement systems. Reviews are collaborative and web-native. - **Word Integration**: A plugin allowing lawyers to review, redline, draft, research, and translate without leaving Microsoft Word. - **AI Agents**: Chain drafting into a full end-to-end workflow — receive the request, draft the document, route for approval, and send — with no manual step required. - **Global Legal Intelligence Engine**: Covers hundreds of trusted sources across 130+ jurisdictions, combined with deep knowledge of the customer’s own entities, risk profile, and prior positions. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company) - **Key Metric**: Total funding raised — **$100M** across two rounds. Last round: **€60.2M ($70M) Series B** (announced June 2026). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Index Ventures, Highland Europe, General Catalyst (the firms behind Figma, Stripe, Discord, Airbnb, Revolut, and Canva). - **Growth Signals**: - Used by **500+ organisations globally**, including major enterprises such as **BT, Financial Times, Safelite, Trip.com, and Canva**. - Reports that **Trustpilot cut contract review time by 85%** using the platform. - Planning to grow workforce from ~100 to **~300 employees**, with significant **US market expansion**. - Founded in 2023 and achieved this scale in just over two years. ## Competitive Advantages - **Category-defining position**: Wordsmith is not a legal copilot for individual lawyers — it is an **operating system for the entire in-house legal function**, managing complete request flows across the organisation. This system-level approach is a structural shift away from traditional point-tools. - **Conflict-free business model**: Wordsmith sits on the side of the *buyer* of legal services (the in-house team), not the *seller* (law firms). All other legacy tools were built to serve law firms. Wordsmith’s incentives are aligned with removing friction and cost for the enterprise. - **Vertical-first AI strategy**: Deeply specialised in legal workflows rather than a generalist AI platform, making the product deeply relevant and defensible in a $1.1T global legal market. - **Founding team**: Led by a CEO (Ross McNairn), CTO (Volodymyr Giginiak), and COO (Robbie Falkenthal) who blend legal domain expertise with deep AI and engineering capability. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale globally, with a US expansion priority**: The Series B is explicitly earmarked to accelerate growth in the US market. - **Hire exceptional talent**: Grow the team to ~300 people, maintaining a “fewer, better people” philosophy — a small group of brilliant specialists rather than a crowd of generalists. - **Product depth**: Continue to invest in AI agents, global legal intelligence, and deeper integration into enterprise workflows (Slack, Salesforce, Word, Gmail). - **Move beyond task assistance to full automation**: The stated vision is to make legal “the last black box” in the enterprise — measurable, compressed, and owned internally. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & Philosophy**: Described as a team of “lawyers and engineers blending two worlds.” Core operating principles include: **“fewer, better people”** (small, elite teams), **relentless focus on simplicity**, and building products that are so elegant they “feel like magic.” The company explicitly values **judgment** as the key differentiator in an AI-powered world. - **Growth Trajectory**: A rare stage — Series B with $100M in funding, a small enough team that individual contributions matter every day, and early enough to shape how the company builds. Significant US expansion ahead. - **Work Environment**: Hybrid (roles listed for Edinburgh and London). The hiring process is transparent and values speed: a 30-min screening call, a 45-min technical interview, a short take-home challenge (a couple of hours), and a culture interview. - **Funding Backing**: Backed by the same investors who backed Figma, Stripe, and Canva — strong signal of ambition and long-term thinking. - **Impact**: Working on a problem that is “genuinely new” — building the platform to run in-house legal teams, which is a category that did not exist before AI made it possible. ## Sources 1. [wordsmith.ai](https://www.wordsmith.ai/) 2. [wordsmith.ai/company](https://www.wordsmith.ai/company) 3. [wordsmith.ai/careers](https://www.wordsmith.ai/careers) 4. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/wordsmith-ai) 5. 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