Principal AI Platform Engineer

Legaltech Hub, Inc.; Toronto; On-site; CAD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Epiq is seeking a Principal AI Platform Engineer to design and build the platform for AI agents and accelerators, enabling scalable, cost-efficient production systems. You will lead end-to-end ownership, drive architectural direction, and mentor engineers across Toronto, the US, and India.

You will focus on orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and observability, while ensuring security, privacy, and regulatory compliance in a fast-paced legal tech environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years building production software with end-to-end ownership.
• Experience building production AI/LLM systems including retrieval-augmented generation and agentic workflows.
• Strong Python. Comfortable in a TypeScript codebase.
• Experience with distributed systems, asynchronous and event-driven architectures, and large batch data processing.
• Demonstrated ownership of production reliability: instrumentation, on-call, incident response, and performance work driven by data rather than intuition.
• Clear written communication. You can explain a design decision and its trade-offs to engineers and to non-engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design and build platform capabilities that power AI agents, including orchestration, retrieval, model routing, tool integration, and reliability.
• Design retrieval systems across large-scale legal document collections.
• Develop shared platform services including prompt management, caching, rate limiting, and cost attribution.
• Define stable APIs and data contracts for product teams.
• Develop evaluation frameworks for accuracy, grounding, citation quality, and overall system performance.
• Build observability, tracing, and replay capabilities that enable rapid troubleshooting.
• Establish quality gates and monitoring to identify regressions before they reach production.
• Optimize latency, throughput, and scalability across both interactive and batch workloads.
• Drive decisions around model selection, inference strategies, caching, and routing while managing cost as a first-class engineering metric.
• Build highly reliable systems through monitoring, alerting, incident response, and operational excellence practices.
• Implement governance, auditability, and human-in-the-loop controls required for legal and regulated workflows.
• Ensure compliance with security, privacy, and data residency requirements.
• Write the design docs and ADRs for consequential platform decisions, including the trade-offs you rejected.
• Raise the engineering bar through code review, pairing, and mentoring. Grow other engineers’ judgment, not just their output.
• Partner with Product Management, legal domain experts, and Review Operations to turn ambiguous problems into shippable scope.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Distributed systems

On-call / incident response

Clear written communication

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related field

Tools

LangGraph

LangChain

MCP

Langfuse

OpenTelemetry

PostgreSQL

Job description

At Epiq, your work contributes to complex, global legal outcomes. You’ll join a values‑driven community where integrity guides decisions, relentless service sets the bar, and we thrive on big challenges together. We invest in your growth with enterprise‑wide learning and mobility. We celebrate who you are, and we respect life beyond work with flexibility that’s recognized externally. Enabled by modern platforms and AI, you’ll do the most meaningful work of your career and see your impact at scale.

Job Description:

Epiq supports some of the world's largest and most complex legal matters, where document collections range from thousands to millions of records. As a Principal AI Platform Engineer, you will design and build the platform our AI agents and accelerators run on, including orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, observability, and the inference path that keeps all of it fast and affordable at production scale.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You will write production code; own significant components end to end. You will set the technical direction that other engineers build on. You will also mentor engineers across our Toronto, US, and India teams through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing.

You will work across two product areas:

• AI Agents. Conversational systems that enable legal professionals to ask complex questions and receive evidence‑based answers grounded in case data.
• AI Accelerators. AI‑powered workflows that automate large‑scale document review tasks including summarization, translation, transcription, language detection, and OCR.

Together, these solutions help legal teams reach defensible outcomes faster while reducing review costs and improving quality.

What You'll Do

Platform Engineering

• Build and own the platform capabilities that power AI agents, including orchestration, retrieval, model routing, tool integration, and reliability.
• Design retrieval systems across large‑scale legal document collections.
• Develop shared platform services including prompt management, caching, rate limiting, and cost attribution.
• Define stable APIs and data contracts for product teams.

Evaluation & Quality

• Develop evaluation frameworks that measure accuracy, grounding, citation quality, and overall system performance.
• Build observability, tracing, and replay capabilities that enable rapid troubleshooting and continuous improvement.
• Establish quality gates and monitoring to identify regressions before they reach production.

Performance, Scale & Cost

• Optimize latency, throughput, and scalability across both interactive and batch workloads.
• Drive decisions around model selection, inference strategies, caching, and routing while managing cost as a first‑class engineering metric.

Reliability & Governance

• Build highly reliable systems through monitoring, alerting, incident response, and operational excellence practices.
• Implement governance, auditability, and human‑in‑the‑loop controls required for legal and regulated workflows.
• Ensure compliance with security, privacy, and data residency requirements.

Technical Leadership Without Direct Reports

• Write the design docs and ADRs for consequential platform decisions, including the trade‑offs you rejected.
• Raise the engineering bar through code review, pairing, and mentoring. Grow other engineers’ judgment, not just their output.
• Partner with Product Management, legal domain experts, and Review Operations to turn ambiguous problems into shippable scope.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master’s degree in computer science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years building production software, with a track record of owning systems end to end.
• Experience building production AI/LLM systems, including retrieval‑augmented generation and agentic workflows.
• Strong Python. Comfortable in a TypeScript codebase.
• Experience with distributed systems, asynchronous and event‑driven architectures, and large batch data processing.
• Demonstrated ownership of production reliability: instrumentation, on‑call, incident response, and performance work driven by data rather than intuition.
• Clear written communication. You can explain a design decision and its trade‑offs to engineers and to non‑engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, MCP, etc.
• LLM observability and evaluation tooling such as Langfuse, OpenTelemetry, etc tracing.
• Vector databases, search infrastructure, and information retrieval fundamentals.
• Hallucination detection, grounding verification, and benchmarking methodology.
• Model fine‑tuning, quantization, or inference optimization.
• React and modern frontend work for internal evaluation and debugging tools.
• Legal technology, eDiscovery, compliance, investigations, or document review.
• Multi‑tenant SaaS platforms with strict data isolation requirements.
• Experience with PostgreSQL.

#LI-KS1

* The Compensation range for this role is $150,000 CAD up to $300,000 CAD annually and may be eligible for an annual discretionary bonus.This will be based on your background and skills alignment with the role.

In considering this role you must be authorized to work within Canada with proof of right to work presented if required. Please also note AI may have been used in the screening process to assess suitability for the advertised role. This role is an Active Vacancy within Epiq.

Your specific salary will be determined based on several factors:

• Location‑based market rate for the role
• Your abilities in relation to the job specification
• Performance during screening and interview
• Pay parity with the wider team in the considered location

Further details about the package will be provided during the initial screening call with the Talent Acquisition Team.

Epiq Leadership Compass

Fosters Relationships & Collaboration

Builds trust and alignment through open communication, shared goals, and strong partnerships to drive collective success.

• Build trust‑based partnerships
• Nurture long‑term relationships
• Remove collaboration barriers
• Celebrate cross‑team success

Engages & Influences

Inspires action and alignment through clear communication, purposeful influence, and a compelling vision.

• Use storytelling to build buy‑in
• Align communication with organizational goals
• Guild alignment through strong engagement

Maximizes Performance

Sets and reinforces performance standards that drive results, ensure accountability, and align with Epiq’s goals.

• Use data to identify improvement opportunities
• Make informed decisions
• Align team goals with boarder strategy
• Empower teams to manage their own goals
• Translate vision into clear priorities
• Prepare for disruptions with strong change management

Achieves Operational Success

Drives continuous improvement and operational excellence through smart processes, data insights, and quality execution.

• Improve workflows for team efficiency
• Use clear documentation and expectations
• Resolve issues quickly using data and feedback

It is Epiq’s policy to comply with all applicable equal employment opportunity laws by making all employment decisions without unlawful regard or consideration of any individual’s race, religion, ethnicity, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expressions, transgender status, sexual and other reproductive health decisions, marital status, age, national origin, genetic information, ancestry, citizenship, physical or mental disability, veteran or family status or any other basis protected by applicable national, federal, state, provincial or local law. Epiq’s policy prohibits unlawful discrimination based on any of these impermissible bases, as well as any bases or grounds protected by applicable law in each jurisdiction. In addition Epiq will take affirmative action for minorities, women, covered veterans and individuals with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation during the application process because of a disability, it is available upon request. Epiq is pleased to provide such assistance and no applicant will be penalized as a result of such a request. Pursuant to relevant law, where applicable, Epiq will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.