Founding Machine Learning Engineer – Legal AI Platform (Seed Stage)

About the Opportunity:
Join a stealth-mode, venture-backed legal AI company revolutionizing how in-house legal teams operate. Our cutting-edge platform bridges business and legal functions, leveraging advanced AI to automate, analyze, and optimize legal workflows—from contract redlining and drafting to intelligent Q&A and workflow orchestration. With early traction from multiple design partners and a highly technical founding team (engineers, ex-lawyers, and consultants), we’re gearing up for a major launch in Fall 2025.

Location:
New York City preferred (San Francisco or fully remote considered)

Compensation:
$200K - 250K+ base salary, early-stage equity with significant upside

What You’ll Do

• Lead AI/ML Development: Architect, implement, and scale large language model (LLM) pipelines, leveraging OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and the latest genAI frameworks.
• Agentic Workflows: Build and optimize agent-based systems (LangChain, semantic pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation) for automated contract review, document drafting, and legal inquiry resolution.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with legal subject matter experts to design, iterate, and refine prompt engineering, evaluation protocols, and feedback mechanisms.
• Production Excellence: Optimize model inference, cost, and scalability on cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure), ensuring high reliability and low latency.
• Data & Model Operations: Establish robust data annotation, model monitoring, and continuous improvement pipelines for ongoing performance gains.
• Founding Team Impact: Shape the technical vision, mentor future ML hires, and grow into a leadership role (Head of AI, CTO, or similar) as the team expands.

What We’re Looking For

• Deep ML/AI Engineering Experience: 4+ years hands-on building and deploying AI/ML systems, with a strong track record of taking LLM-driven products from prototype to production.
• Agentic AI Expertise: Demonstrated experience shipping agent-based or multi-agent solutions (LangChain, custom orchestration, tool-enabled agents, etc.) in real-world environments.
• Prompt Engineering Mastery: Advanced skills in prompt design, chain-of-thought reasoning, few-shot learning, and leveraging the latest LLM advancements.
• Software & Cloud Proficiency: Expert-level Python, cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred), and scalable ML pipeline development.
• Stakeholder Communication: Ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical audiences and collaborate effectively with legal and business teams.
• Ownership & Startup Drive: Entrepreneurial mindset, bias for action, and excitement for building transformative technology from the ground up.

Bonus Points

• Experience in legal tech, fintech, or other regulated industries
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation platforms, A/B testing, or human-in-the-loop systems
• NLP research, information retrieval, or fine-tuning expertise

Why Join?
You’ll have the rare opportunity to shape the core AI engine of a next-generation legal platform, work alongside world-class founders, and make a direct impact as a founding engineer. If you thrive in fast-paced, high-ownership environments and are passionate about building AI that solves real-world legal challenges, we’d love to connect.