AI Native Engineer

Legalist; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Legalist is seeking an AI Native Engineer to join our team and directly collaborate with the co-founder to build AI-powered products and workflows. This hands-on role requires delivering across diverse projects, turning ideas into technical solutions, and iterating rapidly in a fast-paced environment.

The ideal candidate will work on AI agents, tool-calling workflows, and production-ready back-end services, with a focus on reliability, latency, and cost.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software development experience.
• Hands-on experience building applications with LLM APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar.
• Experience building AI agents, tool-calling workflows, or other agentic systems.
• Strong understanding of APIs, backend development, databases, and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience taking software from prototype through production.
• Experience working with financial, legal, or other complex datasets.
• Familiarity with prompt design, context management, model evaluation, and techniques for improving LLM reliability.
• Experience working across a variety of technical projects, ideally for multiple companies or clients.
• Comfortable working independently and figuring things out without a detailed set of requirements.
• Local to New York City and excited about the opportunity to have regular in-person working sessions.

Responsibilities

• Design and build new AI products, tools, and features.
• Build applications using LLMs and foundation model APIs.
• Develop AI agents and multi-step workflows that connect models with internal and external systems.
• Build integrations with third-party APIs, internal data sources, and existing software.
• Design and implement RAG pipelines, including retrieval, embeddings, vector search, and context management.
• Build backend services and APIs to support AI applications.
• Prototype new ideas quickly, thoroughly test them, and turn successful prototypes into production-ready tools.
• Evaluate models and approaches based on accuracy, latency, cost, and reliability.
• Build evaluations and testing processes to measure and improve model outputs.
• Stay current on new models, developer tools, frameworks, and AI capabilities

Skills

LLM APIs

AI agents

API integration

Backend development

Data handling

Prompt design

Independent work

Tools

OpenAI API

Anthropic API

Job description

Intro description:

Legalist is a tech-enabled alternative asset manager that uses proprietary data-driven origination to invest in uncorrelated legal and government-payment assets. Founded out of Y Combinator in 2016, Legalist manages over $1.7 billion for endowments, foundations, and family offices.

Summary

Legalist is looking for an AI Native Engineer to join our team and work directly with our Co-founder to build AI-powered products and workflows. This is a hands-on, execution-focused role for someone who has a track record of building across a variety of projects and is already using AI as a core part of how they develop software. Our ideal candidate operates in a fast-paced environment and can take a business problem or idea, figure out the technical approach, build a solution, and iterate quickly.

Responsibilities

• Design and build new AI products, tools, and features


• Build applications using LLMs and foundation model APIs


• Develop AI agents and multi-step workflows that connect models with internal and external systems


• Build integrations with third-party APIs, internal data sources, and existing software


• Design and implement RAG pipelines, including retrieval, embeddings, vector search, and context management


• Build backend services and APIs to support AI applications


• Prototype new ideas quickly, thoroughly test them, and turn successful prototypes into production-ready tools


• Evaluate models and approaches based on accuracy, latency, cost, and reliability


• Build evaluations and testing processes to measure and improve model outputs


• Stay current on new models, developer tools, frameworks, and AI capabilities

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software development experience


• Hands-on experience building applications with LLM APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar


• Experience building AI agents, tool-calling workflows, or other agentic systems


• Strong understanding of APIs, backend development, databases, and cloud infrastructure


• Experience taking software from prototype through production


• Experience working with financial, legal, or other complex datasets


• Familiarity with prompt design, context management, model evaluation, and techniques for improving LLM reliability


• Experience working across a variety of technical projects, ideally for multiple companies or clients


• Comfortable working independently and figuring things out without a detailed set of requirements


• Local to New York City and excited about the opportunity to have regular in-person working sessions