Staff/Principal AI Engineer

Everlaw is looking for a Staff/Principal AI Engineer to help design and execute our overall technical strategy of applying AI in our product, directly contributing to our company’s vision of being the AI leader in legal discovery and litigation technology. AI is central to our product – not a bolt-on or afterthought – and represents a step-function advancement of our company’s mission of promoting justice by illuminating truth. We take the hardest problems of applying AI to complex litigation reasoning tasks, at the scale of millions (or 100s of millions) of documents and multimodal inputs.

In this role, you will help to drive the work of a core squad of AI engineers, as well as providing technical guidance to engineers to level up their AI expertise across the broader engineering organization. You’ll also collaborate with (and learn from) a community of other staff and principal engineers with industry-leading expertise in databases and storage technologies, search, cloud infrastructure, full stack SaaS application design, data science, and performance. You’ll have regular visibility to, and interactions with, our Chief Technology Officer and other senior leaders at the company.

At Everlaw, engineering is key to our mission. Our company culture is open and vibrant and we’re committed to the professional growth of our team members, offering an annual learning and development stipend and regular check-ins with managers regarding career goals. If you’re looking for a place that values passion, integrity, thinking big, and a desire to learn, we’d love to hear from you! Think you’re missing some of the skills and are hesitant to apply? We do not believe in the ‘perfect’ candidate and encourage you to apply if you feel you can bring value to our team.  

This is a full-time, exempt position located onsite (3 days/week in office) in Oakland, California.

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.
• We’re excited for you to learn, grow, and contribute right away! We trust that you’ll bring industry experience and knowledge that will uplift and uplevel the team, but we don’t expect you to know everything on Day 1.

In your role, you'll...

• Lead the design and implementation of Everlaw's technical AI strategy. This includes staying on the cutting edge of the latest frontier models. Including participating in early access programs with all the major AI labs (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) to provide direct feedback on unreleased models and API design, as well as staying abreast of evolving open-source offerings. You’ll devise our overall approach to using AI at trillion-token scale, including:
• Guide the work of engineers across our company in using AI. We’re an organization devoted to constant learning. As one of our staff/principal engineers, you’ll lead by example in staying abreast of industry developments and sharing your learnings with the team – whether in structured ways like feedback on design documents or code reviews, or in less formal ways, like giving occasional tech talks or leading a study group on AI research papers.
• Collaborate with other software engineers, security engineers, data scientists, product leads and designers, and other cross-functional teams in the pursuit of our goal of being the AI leader in litigation.
• Be on the lookout for new opportunities that AI enables. Help us spot cases where industry or research progression in ML/AI tech will translate to Legal Tech, and influence our engineering and product direction. We’re prepared to act and innovate in bringing the best ideas to market.

About you

• You have at least 6 years of experience working in ML/AI, and 10+ years overall in software engineering
• You have led significant AI projects, including applied use of LLMs in production settings and experience with NLP/text analysis, 
• You have programming skills in at least one scripting language (like Python).
• You’re a constant learner, staying abreast of the latest AI developments from the industry, and how you might apply these to your work
• You're able to collaborate effectively with coworkers on different teams. You can zoom in to discuss technical details with other experienced AI engineers, and can zoom out to explain technical concepts without jargon. You’re willing to share your knowledge and help others learn.

Pluses

• You’ve used Retrieval-based LMs or hybrid approaches with RAG to find answers in very large custom data sets
• You’ve designed approaches for storage and representation of knowledge, and are familiar with vector and graph databases
• You’ve explored multimodal approaches, including image, audio, or video processing
• You’ve built agents to accomplish tasks, including approaches for supervision, backtracking, exception handling, tool use, MCP, etc.
• You have previous experience with SaaS and distributed systems.

Benefits

• The expected salary range for this role is between $228,000 - $340,000. 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 Downtown Oakland, just steps from the BART line and dozens of restaurants
• You will get a powerful Linux laptop and be able to customize your desk setup
• Bond over team lunches and out-of-the-box events 
• Ranked “#1 on G2 for Ediscovery Software and Momentum” and we offer free eDiscovery resources to benefit the greater societal good with Everlaw for Good
• 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-EJ1
• #LI-Hybrid