Construction Contracts Specialist

Position: Construction Contracts Specialist (experienced — this is not an entry-level seat)

Company: Columbia Fire, LLC

Location: Remote. W-2 candidates must reside in Washington, Oregon, or Idaho. 1099 contractors may work remotely from anywhere in the United States. Seattle office available but not required.

Reports To: General Manager, Seattle

Employment Type: Your choice: part-time W-2 employee (non-exempt, hourly) or 1099 independent contractor

Hours: Approximately 30 hours per week for the first 2–3 weeks, then approximately 10–15 hours per week

Bargaining Unit: Non-union

Incentive Eligibility: Not eligible for commission or bonus

Travel: None required

Outside Work: Permitted, subject to the conflict-of-interest terms in this posting

Columbia Fire, LLC has been protecting buildings in the Puget Sound region since 2005. We design, install, inspect, test, service, and repair fire sprinkler and fire alarm systems for general contractors, developers, property managers, and building owners across Washington. We are a Local 699 signatory sprinkler contractor and part of a multi-state regional fire and life safety company.

Our core values guide how we operate: Customer First, Grit, Effective Communication, Own the Outcome, Take Pride in the Work, and Do the Right Thing.

We work almost entirely on other people's paper. Our customers are sophisticated general contractors with their own subcontract forms, master and on-call agreements, and insurance exhibits. Getting those documents right — before they are signed — is how we stay profitable and insurable.

Today, every contract that comes in the door gets its legal and risk review from the CEO. That means contracts wait. A subcontract that sits for a week while the CEO is solving another problem costs us schedule, goodwill with the contractor, and occasionally the leverage to get a provision changed at all.

It also means our review depth varies with how busy the week was. We have a written Contract Review SOP with defined positions on indemnity, insurance, liquidated damages, payment, delay, and termination. The SOP is good. The capacity to apply it consistently, on every document, within a few days, is what is missing, while balancing customer first centricity as our primary core value.

This seat fixes that. You take the legal and risk review — the redlines, the insurance exhibit analysis, the negotiation with the contractor — and the General Manager or CEO keep the escalation decisions and the operational judgment calls. The project manager keeps scope, schedule, and commercial alignment. You own everything in between, and you own turnaround.

This is a working review seat, not a supervisory one and not a legal one. You do not need to be an attorney and we are not asking you to give legal opinions. You are applying a documented set of company positions to real subcontracts, negotiating the ones that are winnable, recognizing the ones that are not, and getting a defensible document back to the contractor quickly.

The one hard commitment in this role is turnaround: no contract sits more than three business days without review and a substantive response to the contractor. Beyond that, you set your own schedule. We care about the result, not the hours you keep.

This is the hardest part of the job and the reason the seat exists. Customer First is our primary core value, and it does not get suspended when a contract shows up.

The general contractors handing us these documents are the same people we want to be working for in five years. A reviewer who marks everything, argues every point, and treats each negotiation as a contest will cost us relationships faster than a bad indemnity clause will cost us money. We do not take a hardline approach. We ask for mutually favorable terms, we explain why a provision is a problem in language the other side can act on, we concede what is standard and genuinely not winnable, and we spend our marks where the exposure is real.

The other half matters just as much. Signing a contract that commits us to obligations we cannot perform, or to risk our insurance will not respond to, does the customer no favors either. A contractor who gets a fast signature today and an uninsured claim three years from now has not been served well. Part of this job is being able to say that out loud — to them, and when necessary to us.

If you can hold both of those at once, you will do well here. If you can only do one, you will not.

Contract Review and Redlining

• Review incoming subcontracts, master and on-call agreements, service agreements, monitoring agreements, purchase orders, and project-specific addenda before execution.
• Apply Columbia Fire's documented review positions to indemnity and duty to defend, additional insured requirements, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory language, limitation of liability, consequential damages, liquidated damages, no-damages-for-delay, termination for convenience, backcharge rights, default and property seizure, pay-if-paid, retainage, bonding, wrap-up programs, lien waivers, notice periods, attorney's fees, warranty duration, venue, and change order rights.
• Request and read the prime contract before settling positions, and confirm for each redline whether our position contradicts the flow-down, matches it, or sits inside its latitude. We do not ask a contractor to grant something it cannot grant.
• Identify every exhibit incorporated by reference but not attached, and obtain it before execution.
• Conform the entire package — sample certificates of insurance, description-of-operations blocks, summary pages, schedules — so no document in the set contradicts the clause you just amended.
• Escalate the defined categories to the General Manager and/or CEO: liquidated damages above our threshold or flowed down with no stated daily rate, any change to monitoring agreement limitation of liability, insurance requirements our program cannot produce, and any contract exceeding the signatory's delegated authority.

Insurance and Risk

• Review insurance exhibits against our actual program — limits, per-project aggregate, completed operations duration, pollution, professional liability, SIR thresholds — and confirm we can produce what is being certified before we agree to it.
• Work fluently in ISO additional insured endorsements, including the CG 20 10 and CG 20 37 families and the practical differences between edition dates.
• Apply Washington-specific realities correctly: L&I does not issue a waiver of subrogation endorsement for state workers' compensation; employers liability comes from Stop Gap coverage on the general liability policy; Title 51 immunity waivers and the mutual-negotiation certification are standard on Washington subcontracts.
• Coordinate certificates of insurance, W-9s, and ACH documentation with the Contract Administrator, and maintain subcontractor certificate files to the standard our general liability carrier audits against.

Negotiation and Turnaround

• Negotiate directly with our customers — general contractors, owners, and their contract and insurance analysts — by email and phone. Most of this role's value is in a well-argued, well-prioritized set of changes, not in the volume of marks.
• Return three options every time — an addendum leaving their form untouched, a redline, and a clean incorporated copy — with a short covering email, so the customer can take the path that costs them least.
• Know which fights are worth having. Some provisions are standard on a general contractor's form and are not going to change; spending a mark on them costs us the terms we could have won.
• Track contract status and approvals so nothing is waiting on us without someone knowing it.

Prequalification and Customer Onboarding

• Complete general contractor, owner, and property manager prequalification packages — company information, licensing, bonding capacity, insurance, safety statistics, references, and financial data — and submit them through customer portals and third-party compliance platforms where required.
• Maintain a current, reusable set of standing answers and supporting documents so each new prequalification is an update rather than a rebuild.
• Coordinate with the Controller, the Contract Administrator, and safety leadership for information you do not hold yourself.
• Track expiration and renewal dates so prequalification status never lapses ahead of a bid.

Making the Process Better

• Improve the Contract Review SOP and our AI review project as you learn where they are thin, wrong, or silent. Work with the CEO on suggested improvements prior to implementation.
• Build reusable redline language, fallback positions, and covering-email patterns rather than rewriting the same argument from scratch. Keep it customer centric.
• Work with project managers, salespeople, and the Contract Administrator so contractual obligations we accepted actually reach the people who have to perform them — particularly short notice windows, which are an express waiver of the claim if missed.

This role is built around an AI-assisted review process, not an ordinary document workflow. Columbia Fire has a purpose-built contract review project in its AI software, loaded with our SOP, our preferred and fallback language, and our standing positions. It drafts the first pass. Your judgment decides what survives.

We are not looking for someone who has heard of AI or used it to summarize an email. We are looking for someone who already works this way every day and can show us what they have built.

• Daily working use of AI software on real document work — review, comparison, drafting, summarization.
• The ability to write and refine structured instructions and project knowledge so the output is consistent and other people can use it without you sitting there.
• Fluency with electronic workflows end to end: Word tracked changes and document compare, PDF markup, e-signature platforms and their artifacts, SharePoint or a network document library, and the discipline to keep versions straight.
• Judgment about where AI is unreliable. An assistant that misreads an endorsement edition date and you do not catch it is worse than no assistant at all.

Be prepared to show a project, instruction set, template, or workflow you built yourself, and to walk us through where it failed and what you changed.

• You can read a broad-form indemnity clause and explain, in plain English, exactly what it costs us and what our insurance will and will not cover.
• You are comfortable respectfully telling a general contractor's contract analyst "no" and comfortable telling us "this one is not winnable, take it and manage it."
• You write clearly and briefly. Your covering emails make it easy for the other side to say yes.
• You work without being managed. Nobody will be assigning you hours or checking your calendar.
• You are precise. You notice when the sample certificate still demands an endorsement the amended article no longer requires.
• You can push hard on a provision and leave the relationship intact. The contractor's analyst should want to take your call next time.
• You would rather build a better position once than argue the same point forty times.

We would rather be honest now than three weeks in.

• If your background is administrative — you routed contracts, assembled packages, chased signatures — but you cannot independently explain indemnity and duty to defend, additional insured endorsement forms and why the edition date matters, and how a liquidated damages provision actually exposes us, this is not the seat. This is a substantive review role.
• Signing contracts in a previous role is not the same as reviewing them. If your experience is that documents crossed your desk and you executed them, you will not be a fit.
• If you have never taken formal contract review training and do not currently redline contracts as a regular part of your work, please do not apply. Both are required.
• If AI is something you are "open to learning," this will be frustrating. The process is already built around it.
• If you need a finished, well-documented process handed to you, this will not go well. Our SOP is real and it is good, but you will hit situations it does not address, and the expectation is that you decide, escalate appropriately, and then improve the SOP. People who have spent an entire career inside a large company with a mature playbook for everything generally struggle here.
• If contract review is an adversarial exercise to you — every mark defended, every point won — you will damage relationships we spent years building. Equally, if you will agree to anything to keep a customer happy, you will hand us exposure we cannot insure. Both failure modes end the same way.
• If you need a full-time seat with full benefits, this is not it, and we would rather you find the right role than take this one and leave.

• Five or more years reviewing and redlining commercial construction contracts — subcontracts, master or on-call agreements, service agreements, or purchase orders — from the subcontractor, general contractor, owner, construction manager, or construction insurance side.
• Completed formal contract review or construction risk training. Examples of what qualifies: CRIS (Construction Risk and Insurance Specialist) coursework, CSI Construction Documents Technology (CDT), AGC, ASA, or CFMA construction contract and risk-transfer courses, NCMA contract management certification, or paralegal contract coursework. Equivalent documented training is acceptable — tell us what you took and when.
• Current, hands-on redlining as a regular part of your work. Not something you did several years ago.
• Demonstrated working knowledge of indemnity and duty to defend, ISO additional insured endorsements including the CG 20 10 and CG 20 37 families and edition-date differences, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory language, completed operations, liquidated damages, pay-if-paid, and no-damages-for-delay.
• Advanced Microsoft Word — tracked changes, document compare, styles — and practical fluency with PDF markup and e-signature platforms.
• Demonstrated daily use of AI tools on substantive document work, with examples you can show and discuss.
• The ability to work independently against a defined turnaround standard without day-to-day supervision.
• High school diploma or GED.
• Legally authorized to work in the United States. W-2 candidates must reside in Washington, Oregon, or Idaho; independent contractors may be located anywhere in the United States.

No college degree is required for this position.

Two backgrounds we would be glad to see: a former insurance claims adjuster, or a licensed commercial property and casualty agent or broker. Both spend their careers on the question this role answers every day — when the loss comes, does the policy actually respond?

• Washington construction contract experience, including Title 51 immunity waivers, Stop Gap employers liability, and the retainage limits under RCW 60.28.011 and RCW 60.30.010.
• Experience with a specialty subcontractor in fire protection, mechanical, electrical, or another MEP trade.
• Familiarity with AIA A401, ConsensusDocs 750, and large general contractor proprietary subcontract forms.
• Experience with master and on-call agreements, where the terms bind every future award.
• Experience with alarm monitoring or recurring service agreements and their limitation of liability provisions.
• Property and casualty claims adjusting experience, or an active or lapsed commercial P&C producer license.
• Background in insurance brokerage, risk management, or certificate compliance supporting construction clients.
• Experience completing contractor prequalification packages and maintaining third-party compliance platform profiles.
• Familiarity with Acumatica, ServiceTrade, Procore, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Textura, or GCPay.
• Paralegal certificate or law degree. Helpful, not required, and not a substitute for construction contract experience.

Columbia Fire posts a good-faith range for every position. The rate offered depends on experience, demonstrated contract review depth, and which engagement structure you choose.

• Part-time W-2 employee: $45.00 – $60.00 per hour, non-exempt. Overtime is not expected in this role and is paid as required by Washington law when it occurs.
• 1099 independent contractor: $60.00 – $85.00 per hour, invoiced. The higher range reflects self-employment taxes, your own equipment and software, and the absence of employer-provided benefits.

This position is not eligible for commission, bonus, or other incentive compensation.