AI Researcher

Ivo; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 325,000; Full time

Job summary

Ivo is looking for an AI Researcher to push the boundaries of legal technology using LLMs and advanced AI techniques. You'll be a core part of the innovation team, translating research into industry-changing product features.

Your creative solutions will revolve around complex legal texts, enhancing the trustworthiness of AI applications while improving efficiency for overworked legal teams. A strong Ph.D. background and deep learning experience, especially with LLMs, are essential.

Qualifications

• Exceptional ability demonstrated through publications or projects.
• Hands-on experience with deep learning, particularly LLMs.
• Expertise in agentic systems or similar methodologies.

Responsibilities

• Own a research roadmap from identifying problems to shipping solutions.
• Design and implement novel approaches for legal AI applications.
• Conduct research on trustworthiness and hallucination detection.

Skills

Deep learning research

Excellent communication skills

Experience in LLMs

Bias toward action

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

Job description

Engineering at Ivo

• An AI agent that lives in MS Word and edits the document for you [2023]
• Ditching imprecise embeddings models in favor of agentic RAG [2023]
• Large-scale LLM‑based legal fact extraction [2024]
• A legal assistant that can search large contract databases without sacrificing accuracy [2024]
• Clustering legal documents descended from the same family [2025]
• Automatic deviation analysis to locate buried risk in huge contract databases [2025]
• Merging contracts with their amendments to produce a time series of "composite" contracts (a customer actually cried when we showed her this) [2025]

The Role: Why, What, and Who

Why: AI Researchers are the engine of innovation at Ivo. You'll push the state of the art in applying LLMs, deep learning, and advanced AI techniques to the unique and high‑stakes challenges of the legal domain—where accuracy, explainability, and robustness aren't nice‑to‑haves, they're the product. Your research will translate directly into features that redefine how legal professionals work. This isn't an academic role. It's a chance to see your research fundamentally change an industry.

What you'll do

You will own a research roadmap end‑to‑end: identifying the right problems, designing experiments, prototyping, and shipping the winners into production alongside the engineering team. Concretely, that looks like:

• Advance the core AI platform. Design and implement novel approaches to the problems at the heart of Ivo's product: reasoning over long‑context legal corpora, contract comparison and redlining, information extraction, and automated drafting and editing.
• Make our models trustworthy. Conduct research on procedural hallucination detection and resolution, calibration, and explainability. In a domain where a single fabricated citation can sink a deal, the bar for groundedness is uncompromising—your job is to keep raising it.
• Push frontier techniques into production. Explore and apply advanced fine‑tuning, PEFT, and distillation techniques to make our models faster, cheaper, and more accurate on legal‑specific tasks. Evaluate emerging work in agentic systems, long‑context modeling, and reasoning, and figure out which ideas actually move the needle for our customers.
• Build the evaluation infrastructure. Design and maintain datasets, benchmarks, and evals for training and measuring model performance on complex legal text. Define the metrics that matter, and hold the team to them.
• Ship. Partner closely with Engineering and Product to take prototypes from notebook to production, write internal reports that influence the technical direction of the platform, and present findings to both technical and non‑technical audiences across the company.

Compensation

USD salary range: $250K–$325K.

Required

• A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related quantitative field—or equivalent industry research experience with a comparable track record.
• Evidence of exceptional ability—paper, shipped system, open‑source contribution, competition result, or hard problem you cracked that puts you meaningfully ahead of peers.
• Deep, hands‑on experience in deep learning research and development, particularly with LLMs. Strong working knowledge of modern frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow) and the surrounding open‑source ecosystem.
• Expertise in at least one of: agentic systems, reasoning, parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning (PEFT) methods, quantization, inference optimization (e.g., speculative decoding), hallucination mitigation, novel architectures in deep learning, or robust evaluation methodology for LLMs.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex research findings clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• A bias toward action: you ship rather than perfect, you measure rather than guess, and you’d rather have a working prototype today than a polished plan next week.

Nice to Have

• Publications at top venues—e.g., ML/AI conferences (NeurIPS, AAAI, ICML, ICLR), or peer‑reviewed journals in adjacent quantitative fields (Journal of Computational Physics, SIAM journals, Journal of the ACM, Nature, Science, PNAS) — or equivalent strong research contributions in industry.
• Experience with long‑context modeling, retrieval, or grounded generation in high‑stakes domains (legal, medical, financial).
• Prior work on hallucination detection, calibration, or interpretability.
• A track record of building from zero in fast‑paced startup or research environments.

You'll Thrive At Ivo If

• You love writing code, but you love impact more. We’re a team of engineers at heart, but our #1 goal is the best possible product. That means making pragmatic choices and looking for 80/20 solutions over the elegant 100% answer.
• You’re relentlessly resourceful. When the path isn’t clear, you find one. When the tool doesn’t exist, you build it.
• You have a strong internal sense of urgency. You’d rather do it today than tomorrow.
• You’re excited by the adventure of building a company. Startup experience is preferred, but not required — the disposition matters more than the resume line.

Mission

Every major business has an in‑house legal team, and all those lawyers are overworked. 80‑hour weeks, tight deadlines, and contract‑reading death marches are industry norm. Until recently, there wasn’t anything technology could do about it. LLMs have given us the ability to give lawyers their lives back. At Ivo, that’s our mission. We’re building an AI‑native platform to automate legal drudgery. People love our software—despite high competition, we have the highest trial win rate on the market (85%). We’re genuinely improving people’s lives, and we’re only just getting started.