Senior Legal AI Systems Engineer (Hybrid & Secure)

Debevoise & Plimpton; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP is seeking a Legal AI Systems Engineer to lead hands-on AI research, translate business needs into secure technical solutions, and move AI use cases from experimentation through production. You will collaborate with Practice Systems & Applied AI, Information Security, Data Strategy & Security attorneys, Enterprise Applications, Infrastructure, Knowledge Management, and lawyers.

The role requires strong software development skills, experience with AI architectures, and a

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, data science, information systems, or related field.
• Minimum of five years working in software engineering, application development, systems integration, data engineering, ML engineering, or related technical role.
• Hands‑on background developing AI-enabled applications using large language models or related technologies.
• Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, embeddings, vector databases, and document processing pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Head of Practice Systems & Applied AI to execute the AI strategy through research, prototyping, development and deployment.
• Lead technical R&D involving LLMs, generative AI, retrieval‑augmented generation, agentic systems, and document intelligence.
• Design, build, and maintain AI applications, services, workflows, integrations, and prototypes for legal practices and Firm operations.
• Evaluate emerging AI models, frameworks, platforms, and tools against security, performance and operational requirements.
• Develop on‑premises, private, or hybrid AI capabilities where security or data residency requires.
• Integrate Model Context Protocol servers, clients, and tools with internal databases and enterprise platforms.

Skills

Python

LLMs & AI systems

APIs & integration

Deployment & security

Project leadership

Legal tech familiarity

Data privacy

Cloud/hybrid architecture

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering/DS

Job description

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP is seeking a Legal AI Systems Engineer to lead hands-on AI research, translate business needs into secure technical solutions, and move AI use cases from experimentation through production. You will collaborate with Practice Systems & Applied AI, Information Security, Data Strategy & Security attorneys, Enterprise Applications, Infrastructure, Knowledge Management, and lawyers.

The role requires strong software development skills, experience with AI architectures, and a