Legal AI Engineer

Overview

Cleary Gottlieb is a pioneer in globalizing the legal profession. We have 14 offices in major financial centers around the world, but we operate as a single, integrated global partnership and not as a U.S. firm with a network of overseas locations. The firm employs approximately 1,100 lawyers from more than 50 countries.

Since 1946 our lawyers and staff have worked across practices, industries, jurisdictions, and continents to provide clients with simple, actionable approaches to their most complex legal and business challenges, whether domestic or international. We support every client relationship with intellectual agility, commercial acumen, and a human touch.

Cleary Gottlieb’s AI Acceleration Team combines frontier AI with elite legal expertise to redesign legal work from first principles. We are AI engineers, data scientists, software engineers and lawyers.

We began as Springbok AI, a startup, and still run like one: we ship bespoke AI workflows, co-pilots and tools that lawyers choose to use, backed by a world-class law firm.

Responsibilities

The Role:

We’re hiring a Legal AI Engineer fluent with both lawyers and technical teams. In the morning you’ll analyze a workflow with a partner; in the afternoon you’ll discuss knowledge graphs with our data scientists and engineers. You translate between them, and the product improves as a result.

Ideally, you’ve trained and worked as a lawyer, however, we are considering alternative legal / legaltech backgrounds. You don’t need to code, or to have used code editor; you do need to be willing to learn both.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Design legal workflows: Turn legal processes into automations lawyers adopt and find where automation can save time or reduce errors.
• Engineer prompts: Write, review and refine prompts with our NLP specialists until outputs meet a lawyer’s standard.
• Bridge law and engineering: Translate legal requirements into technical specifications, and technical constraints into terms lawyers trust.
• Configure and test: Tailor our AI tools to real legal use cases; test and iterate until they work in practice, not just in a demo.
• Champion our users: Provide first-line support to our lawyers and turn their feedback into prioritized input for engineers.
• Get hands-on: Work alongside our engineers with AI coding assistants and at the command line: edit templates and configuration, run scripts and inspect outputs. We’ll teach you the tools.

Qualifications

What You Bring:

• 3+ years’ experience in or alongside legal teams, including drafting, review, summarization and data extraction
• JD strongly preferred, or extensive experience with legal teams
• Command of the principles of legal work: accuracy, explainability, confidentiality and privilege, rigor, risk-awareness and accountability
• Working knowledge of AI concepts such as agents, retrieval, chain-of-thought prompting and few-shot learning, and the ability to discuss them with data scientists and engineers. We’ll make you an expert within 90 days.
• Familiarity with the legal AI landscape (Harvey, Legora, Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis) and a view on its direction
• Clear written and verbal communication: you can explain a model’s limitations to a partner and a lawyer’s risk concerns to an engineer
• Self-direction: you build processes where none exist and dig in when something isn’t working
• Willingness to learn how to use a code editor and basic scripting; no prior experience required

Bonus Points:

• Experience in practice development, knowledge management, legal operations or legal service delivery
• Startup or legal tech experience, ideally in agile or product-led teams
• Experience with no-code or low-code builders (e.g. Framer, Squarespace)
• Existing comfort with code editors or scripting, or something real you’ve vibe-coded

Why You’ll Love It Here:

• Build from the ground up and change how lawyers at a world-class firm practice
• Join a small, ambitious team
• Learn across AI, product, design and engineering
• Have a voice: we want your ideas, not just your execution

The estimated base salary range for this position is $185,000 to $250,000 at the time of posting. The actual salary offered will depend on a variety of job-related factors, including skills, education, training, credentials, experience, scope and complexity of role responsibilities, geographic location, and performance. This role is exempt meaning it is not overtime pay eligible.

Cleary provides a comprehensive benefits package, including health care benefits. More information can be found here: Benefits

We are an equal opportunity employer and prohibit discrimination based on any category protected by law. Cleary provides reasonable accommodations to enable otherwise qualified employees to perform the essential functions of their position, provided the accommodation does not pose an undue hardship to the Firm.

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