Innovation AI Lead: Legal Tech & RAG Architect

Kirkland & Ellis; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 233,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Kirkland & Ellis seeks an Innovation Lead AI Developer to join Innovation Engineering and own the technical direction, architecture, and delivery quality of AI projects. You will remain hands-on while mentoring engineers, partnering with attorneys and business leaders, and setting secure, scalable foundations for fast-moving environments.

You’ll define architecture, review designs, and drive strategic technical decisions across product families, collaborating with consultants and IT to ensure

Qualifications

• Nine years of experience delivering software or AI solutions in professional services, legal, or technical environments.
• Advanced Python skills and production experience with RAG pipelines and agentic/workflow orchestration.
• Experience designing and operating LLM evaluation frameworks and cloud deployments (Azure).

Responsibilities

• Define and document architecture, platform choices, system boundaries, integration patterns, and engineering standards for an assigned workstream or product family.
• Stay hands-on by developing the highest-risk components and creating reusable templates, libraries, and deployment patterns.
• Review designs, sequence engineers’ work, remove blockers, and serve as escalation point for complex decisions.
• Translate ambiguous legal and business needs into clear technical plans with measurable outcomes, milestones, and success criteria.
• Oversee evaluation results, security, monitoring, maintainability, incident response, documentation, and health of production solutions.
• Lead build-versus-adopt assessments and conduct technical diligence on vendor platforms and third-party tools.
• Lead discovery and roadmap discussions with partners, practice group leaders, business unit heads, embedded teams, and IT, explaining technical choices clearly.
• Collaborate with external consultants and vendor engineers to support successful joint delivery.
• Mentor developers and contribute reusable insights to shared standards and training.

Skills

Python

RAG pipelines

agentic workflows

Orchestration frameworks

Vector databases

Knowledge graph

LLM evaluation

CI/CD

Monitoring & Observability

Microsoft Azure

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

Microsoft Azure

Job description

Kirkland & Ellis seeks an Innovation Lead AI Developer to join Innovation Engineering and own the technical direction, architecture, and delivery quality of AI projects. You will remain hands-on while mentoring engineers, partnering with attorneys and business leaders, and setting secure, scalable foundations for fast-moving environments.

You’ll define architecture, review designs, and drive strategic technical decisions across product families, collaborating with consultants and IT to ensure