Research Engineer — Legal AI & Knowledge Reasoning

Startup Atlas; Rotterdam; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Upside as we grow

Inspiring workplace in Rotterdam

Job summary

Zeno, a legal AI startup, is hiring a Senior/Staff Research Engineer to advance LLM-heavy systems, knowledge representation, and legal reasoning.

You will build an experimentation framework, design rigorous experiments, and collaborate with researchers, ML engineers, and legal domain experts to improve automated reasoning over law.

This role combines theory and production readiness, with ownership and autonomy to move ideas from first principles to production in a high-stakes product.

Qualifications

• Background in applied research, machine learning, data science, or related quantitative field.
• PhD or strong MSc in biomedical engineering, physics, mathematics, or related field.
• Senior-level experience as a research engineer, machine learning engineer, or similar role in industry research labs.
• Strong experimental design skills and statistical reasoning.
• Comfort working in domains with ambiguity, incomplete supervision, and high correctness requirements.
• Strong Python skills for research code, experimentation, and analysis.
• Ability to communicate findings clearly to engineering, product, and domain experts.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain a reusable experimentation framework (reproducible runs, controlled comparisons, fast iteration loops).
• Design rigorous experiments: ablations, baselines, error taxonomies, uncertainty quantification.
• Create evaluation datasets + benchmarks where no clean ground truth exists.
• Prototype and validate computational models of law that formalize legal concepts, rules, and dependencies across jurisdictions.
• Adapt, combine, and when needed invent methods with meaningful compute.
• Write internal research reports that turn ambiguous questions into measurable progress.
• Collaborate closely with research scientists, ML engineers, and legal domain experts; hand off validated approaches for productionization.

Skills

Python

Experimental design

Machine learning

Quantitative analysis

Communication

Education

PhD or MSc in a related field

Job description

Zeno, a legal AI startup, is hiring a Senior/Staff Research Engineer to advance LLM-heavy systems, knowledge representation, and legal reasoning.

You will build an experimentation framework, design rigorous experiments, and collaborate with researchers, ML engineers, and legal domain experts to improve automated reasoning over law.

This role combines theory and production readiness, with ownership and autonomy to move ideas from first principles to production in a high-stakes product.