Senior Legal AI Systems Engineer - Practice AI & Security

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York seeks a Legal AI Systems Engineer to lead hands-on AI research, translate business needs into secure technical solutions, and move use cases from experiments to production. You will partner with Practice Systems, Information Security, Knowledge Management, and lawyers to ensure security, privacy, reliability, and performance.

The role emphasizes building AI-enabled applications, governance, and collaboration within a leading legal environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS, software engineering, data science, or related field.
• Minimum of five years in software engineering or related tech role.
• Experience designing, deploying, and supporting production apps.
• Hands-on AI-enabled apps using LLMs or generative AI.
• Familiar with retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector databases.
• Knowledge of cloud, on-prem, or hybrid architectures.
• Experience with APIs, databases, and secure connections.
• Ability to translate legal workflows into technical requirements.

Responsibilities

• Research, prototype, develop, integrate, test, and deploy AI solutions.
• Lead AI research on LLMs, generative AI, RAG, and agentic systems.
• Design and maintain AI apps, services, workflows, and integrations.
• Assess models and tools against security, performance, and compliance.
• Collaborate with lawyers and IT teams to deliver production-ready AI.

Skills

Python

LLMs

APIs

Security

Data pipelines

Communication

Education

BSc/CS or related

Job description

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York seeks a Legal AI Systems Engineer to lead hands-on AI research, translate business needs into secure technical solutions, and move use cases from experiments to production. You will partner with Practice Systems, Information Security, Knowledge Management, and lawyers to ensure security, privacy, reliability, and performance.

The role emphasizes building AI-enabled applications, governance, and collaboration within a leading legal environment.