Senior Legal Engineer

This role sits at the intersection of legal practice and legal technology and plays an essential role in shaping the future of the product. In this role, you will bring a deep understanding of how attorneys work- their processes, use cases- to set the bar for how legal AI behaves, optimizing system prompts, designing evaluations, and ensuring every output aligns with real-world legal standards. You will be instrumental in measuring and continually improving the substantive accuracy and quality of the legal workflows and output the product produces. 

By blending legal domain expertise, data analysis, and workflow modeling, you'll help ensure our AI tools are accurate, practical, and user-aligned. This hands-on role involves close collaboration with engineering, product, and design to define AI performance metrics, and requires designing and curating datasets reflecting how legal teams interact with documents.

Getting started

• We want you to feel like part of the team early on! Our onboarding process will integrate you into the company with informative sessions on our product, policies, processes, and team structure and goals. [And you’ll spend meaningful time getting to know your direct reports and discover what excites and challenges them.]
• We’re excited for you to learn, grow, and contribute right away! We trust that you’ll bring experience and knowledge that will uplift and uplevel the team, but we don’t expect you to know everything on Day 1.

Key Responsibilities...

Prompt Optimization & Workflow Development:

• Systematically discover and test prompt engineering best practices to ensure the accuracy and reliability of AI outputs trusted by legal teams. 
• Drive product enhancements by translating legal expertise into features. 
• Collaborate with Engineering on LLM calls. Review and validate product outputs for quality. 
• Translate client requests into concrete, testable prompts and evaluation criteria. Draft and iterate on system/developer prompts for AI systems.

Benchmark Design and Evaluation: 

• Assess foundational model performance and suitability for various legal tasks.
• Collaborate with Product and customers to optimize genAI legal workflows. Develop datasets that accurately model legal tasks (e.g., document review, privilege detection), annotating data for edge cases and variability. 
• Lead the creation of cutting-edge legal AI evaluations, designing and running rigorous tests to ensure outputs meet the high standards of legal professionals. 
• Dataset curation and labelling for testing. 

Data Analysis & Evaluation:

• Build and annotate complex legal datasets and document collections.
• Analyze model performance and iteratively improve AI solutions.
• Build metrics and reporting pipelines to monitor system quality and workflow performance.
• Analyze usage data to gauge effectiveness.

Collaboration:

• Serve as the legal voice of quality, advocating for precision, consistency, and clarity in AI outputs.
• Provide domain-specific legal expertise that guides feature development and product roadmap decisions.
• Act as the bridge between technical teams and legal domain expertise, translating complex legal concepts into clear product requirements and vice versa.
• Share findings with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Ideate new products based on your deep understanding of legal teams’ pain points.
• Participate in customer calls and feedback sessions.

About you

• 3+ years of relevant legal experience, JD preferred. 
• Exceptional written communication and a strong interest in the application of AI in the field of law. 
• Familiarity with a coding/scripting language or coding agents (e.g., gemini-cli, claude code, codex-cli)
• Experience with generative AI in legal work, including evaluation of outputs, design/interpretation of metrics, and abstracting legal reasoning into repeatable steps. 
• The ideal candidate is curious, detail-oriented, pragmatic, and able to bridge data science with product building, working cross-functionally to align data with user experience goals.

Benefits

• The expected salary range for this role is between $163,000 - $206,000. The final offered salary will be dependent upon many factors including the candidate’s experience and skills. The base pay range is subject to change in the future.
• Equity program
• 401(k) retirement plan with company matching
• Health, dental, and vision
• Flexible Spending Accounts for health and dependent care expenses
• Paid parental leave and approximately 10 days (80 hours) per year of sick leave
• Seventeen paid vacation days plus 11 federal holidays
• Membership to Modern Health to help employees prioritize mental health and wellness
• Annual allocation for Learning & Development opportunities and applicable professional membership dues
• Company-sponsored life and disability insurance
• Find out more about our Benefits and Perks

Perks

• Work in Uptown Oakland, just steps from the BART line and dozens of restaurants and walking distance to Lake Merritt
• Flexible work-from-home days on Tuesdays and Fridays
• Monthly home internet reimbursement
• Select your preference of hardware (Mac or PC) and customize your desk setup
• Enjoy a wide variety of snacks and beverages in the office
• Bond over company-wide out-of-the-box events and fun activities with your team
• Time off for company-sponsored volunteer events and 4 paid hours per quarter to volunteer at a charitable organization of your choice
• Take advantage of learning and career development opportunities 
• Ranked #9 on Glassdoor's Best Places to Work 2023 for US small and medium companies
• One of Wealthfront’s 2021 Career Launching Companies, and ranked #2 on the “2022 Bay Area Best Places to Work” list by the San Francisco Business Times and the Silicon Valley Business Journal
• One of Fast Company’s World's Most Innovative Companies for 2022 and proud contributor of free ediscovery resources to benefit the greater good through “Everlaw for Good”
• #LI-KP1
• #LI-Hybrid