AI Engineer

Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP; Nashville (TN); On-site; USD 85,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP seeks an AI Engineer to design, develop, test, and deploy AI-enabled solutions supporting the Firm’s legal and business operations. You will bridge workflows and scalable AI systems from discovery to production, focusing on reliability, security, and governance.

You’ll collaborate with attorneys and business teams to identify opportunities, build prototypes, and scale production applications using Azure Databricks, LangGraph, n8n, and related platforms.

Qualifications

• Strong Python skills and ability to build production‑quality software using APIs, tests, version control, and code review.
• Working knowledge of SQL and experience integrating data, apps, and AI components.
• Hands‑on experience building AI agents, multi‑step AI workflows, and tool integrations.
• Experience with prompt design, structured outputs, state management, error handling, and human‑in‑the‑loop workflows.
• Practical experience with Azure Databricks and related Azure services for development and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Identify AI opportunities with attorneys, practice groups, and business teams; define requirements and success criteria.
• Design, build, test, and deploy AI agents and multi‑step workflows using Databricks, n8n, LangGraph, and related tools.
• Integrate AI solutions with enterprise apps, APIs, and governed data sources with human review processes.
• Develop prototypes with users and scale validated concepts into production applications.
• Create evaluation datasets, automated tests, and quality metrics for agent performance and cost.

Skills

analytical thinking

problem solving

stakeholder communication

collaboration

creative thinking

Tools

Python

SQL

Azure Databricks

Microsoft Azure

n8n

LangGraph

Databricks Agent Bricks

LangSmith

MLflow

Spark

Delta Lake

Unity Catalog

Lakebase

Delta Sharing

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

PostgreSQL

TypeScript

JavaScript

React

Microsoft Entra ID

Job description

The AI Engineer at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP designs, develops, tests, and deploys AI-enabled solutions to support the Firm’s legal and business operations. This role bridges business workflows and scalable AI systems, contributing from early discovery and prototyping through production deployment and ongoing improvement.

Responsibilities

• Work with attorneys, practice groups, and business teams to identify AI opportunities, understand workflows, define requirements, and set measurable success criteria.
• Design, develop, test, and deploy AI agents and multi-step workflows using platforms and frameworks including Azure Databricks, n8n, LangGraph, and Databricks Agent Bricks.
• Integrate AI solutions with enterprise applications, APIs, governed data sources, and native Microsoft Azure services, including appropriate human review and approval processes.
• Develop prototypes with users, then transform validated concepts into reliable, scalable production applications.
• Create and maintain evaluation datasets, automated tests, and quality measures to assess agent behavior, retrieval quality, tool‑use accuracy, task completion, performance, latency, and cost.
• Review execution traces, system behavior, and failure patterns to troubleshoot issues and continuously improve AI solutions.
• Partner with Data Architecture and DevOps teams to support governed data access, application deployment, environment configuration, monitoring, and production support.
• Implement reliability safeguards such as error handling, retries, timeouts, stopping conditions, recovery processes, and controls to prevent unintended or duplicate actions.
• Apply security, access controls, data protections, source traceability, and responsible AI practices, including protections against prompt injection, inappropriate access, and data leakage.
• Engage with users after deployment to gather feedback, support adoption, measure business impact, and identify enhancements.
• Contribute through code reviews, technical documentation, knowledge sharing, and development of reusable components, standards, and best practices.

Requirements

• Strong Python skills and demonstrated ability to build maintainable, production‑quality software using APIs, automated testing, version control, and code review.
• Working knowledge of SQL and experience integrating application, data, and AI components.
• Hands‑on experience building AI agents, agent‑enabled applications, or multi‑step AI workflows involving language models, enterprise information, APIs, or external tools.
• Experience with prompt and context design, structured outputs, tool integration, state management, error handling, and human‑in‑the‑loop workflows.
• Practical experience with Azure Databricks and working knowledge of Microsoft Azure services relevant to application development, integration, or deployment.
• Understanding of retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), embeddings, retrieval techniques, and how source quality affects system performance.
• Experience evaluating and troubleshooting AI applications, including analysis of execution traces, failures, task completion, quality, latency, or cost.
• Understanding of production engineering practices, including deployment, configuration management, secrets management, monitoring, automated testing, and troubleshooting.
• Working knowledge of authentication, authorization, role‑based access controls, and security considerations for enterprise AI applications and sensitive information.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills, with the ability to translate ambiguous business requirements into practical technical solutions.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts and tradeoffs effectively with technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated collaboration, accountability, curiosity, and ability to work effectively with engineers, domain experts, and business users.

Technologies

Python, SQL, Azure Databricks, Microsoft Azure, n8n, LangGraph, Databricks Agent Bricks, LangSmith, MLflow, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Lakebase, Delta Sharing, Model Context Protocol (MCP), PostgreSQL, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Microsoft Entra ID

Preferred Skills & Knowledge

• Experience deploying, monitoring, and supporting AI applications in a production environment.
• Experience with one or more AI orchestration or workflow technologies, including n8n, LangGraph, Databricks Agent Bricks, or comparable platforms.
• Experience with MLflow, LangSmith, or similar AI tracing, observability, and evaluation tools.
• Advanced experience with Azure Databricks technologies, including Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Lakebase, or Delta Sharing.
• Experience designing and optimizing RAG solutions, including vector search, hybrid retrieval, filtering, reranking, document processing, metadata extraction, and retrieval evaluation.
• Experience with graph databases, knowledge graphs, graph-based RAG, or techniques for identifying and linking entities and relationships across information sources.
• Experience working with PostgreSQL or similar technologies to support persistent agent state, checkpoints, or memory.
• Front‑end or application development experience using TypeScript, JavaScript, React, or similar technologies.
• Experience designing user‑facing AI applications with streaming responses, citations, progress indicators, feedback mechanisms, and human review.
• Experience developing reusable AI tools and enterprise integrations, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) or comparable integration approaches.
• Experience designing evaluation datasets, benchmarks, regression testing, automated scoring, or LLM‑based evaluation methods.
• Knowledge of statistical analysis or experimental design used to evaluate AI system performance and improvements.
• Experience with Microsoft Entra ID, managed identities, and enterprise authentication and authorization models.
• Experience working in legal services, professional services, technical consulting, or another environment involving sensitive information and complex business workflows.

Location and Compensation

• Location: Nashville, TN (onsite)
• Salary Range: USD 85,000 - 170,000 per yearly

Physical Requirements

• Ability to sit and stand for extended periods.
• Ability to lift up to 15 pounds.