Innovation Lead AI Developer

About the role

As an Innovation Lead AI Developer, you’ll join Innovation Engineering to build intelligent products and data-driven solutions that improve quality, speed, and decision-making across legal work and firm operations. This firm-wide role reports to Innovation Engineering leadership and owns the technical direction, architecture, and delivery quality of a workstream or product family within the artificial intelligence portfolio. You’ll remain hands-on with complex technical work while guiding assigned engineers, partnering with attorneys and business leaders, and establishing secure, scalable foundations in fast-moving or newly built environments. This is a lead individual contributor position with no formal direct reports and occasional travel.

Responsibilities

• Define and document architecture, platform choices, system boundaries, integration patterns, and engineering standards for an assigned workstream or product family.
• Stay substantially hands-on by developing the highest-risk or most novel components and creating reusable templates, libraries, evaluation tools, and deployment patterns.
• Review designs, sequence engineers’ work, remove technical blockers, and serve as the escalation point for complex architecture and design decisions.
• Translate ambiguous legal and business needs into clear technical plans with measurable outcomes, milestones, and success criteria.
• Oversee evaluation results, security, monitoring, maintainability, incident response, documentation, and the overall health of production solutions.
• Lead build-versus-adopt assessments and conduct technical diligence on vendor platforms and third-party tools.
• Lead discovery and roadmap discussions with partners, practice group leaders, business unit heads, embedded teams, and Information Technology (IT), explaining technical choices and trade-offs in clear language.
• Collaborate constructively with external consultants, vendor engineering teams, and forward-deployed engineers to support successful joint delivery.
• Mentor developers at multiple career levels, provide input on their growth, and contribute reusable insights to shared standards, playbooks, and training.

Requirements

• A bachelor’s degree.
• At least nine years of experience delivering software or artificial intelligence solutions in professional services, legal, or technical environments, including success setting technical direction for a team or product area.

Qualifications

• Advanced Python skills and deep production experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, agentic workflows, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, and knowledge-graph-backed solutions.
• Experience designing and operating Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation frameworks in production and using results to inform architecture and product decisions.
• Experience with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), monitoring and observability, secure deployment, and performance at scale using Microsoft Azure or a comparable cloud platform.
• A record of establishing standards, infrastructure, and reusable patterns in evolving environments while helping other engineers grow through mentorship and thoughtful review.
• The credibility and communication skills to lead discussions with senior non-technical stakeholders, explain complex topics clearly, and work effectively with vendors and consultants.
• Experience in