Software Engineer, AI Agents

Epiq Systems, Inc; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 285,000; Full time

Job summary

Epiq AI Labs at Epiq Systems, Inc. is building the next‑generation AI platform for corporate legal departments and global law firms. The team operates with startup speed, high autonomy, and strong safety standards, shipping intelligent agents and orchestration runtimes in production.

You will own core systems end‑to‑end, including orchestration, retrieval, and evaluation infrastructure, while maintaining traceability, confidentiality, and tenant isolation in legal workflows.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software‑engineering experience with backend, distributed, or AI systems.
• Experience delivering and operating LLM-powered apps in production at scale.
• Experience building tool‑using agent workflows or retrieval‑augmented generation systems.
• Strong production‑level proficiency in Python.
• Understanding of ML lifecycle, model/data versioning, deployment and monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design the agentic platform: orchestration of single agents and parallel sub‑agents, durable state and memory, tool integration, observability.
• Build safety layer agents: tool registration, sandboxing, guardrails, output validation, defenses against prompt injection.
• Develop agent workflows with multi‑step reasoning, tool use, human‑in‑the‑loop checkpoints, and recovery from partial failure.
• Evolve in‑house model services for classification, extraction, embeddings, and integrate with frontier models.
• Establish LLMOps practices: routing, fallbacks, latency and cost budgets, versioning, caching, monitoring.
• Collaborate with product, research, and security stakeholders; produce design docs and test plans.

Skills

Python

LLM/AI systems

Backend distributed systems

Observability tooling

Security/compliance

Effective communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related field

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

At Epiq, your work contributes to complex, global legal outcomes. You’ll join a values-driven community where integrity guides decisions, relentless service sets the bar, and we thrive on big challenges together. We invest in your growth with enterprise-wide learning and mobility. We celebrate who you are, and we respect life beyond work with flexibility that’s recognized externally. Enabled by modern platforms and AI, you’ll do the most meaningful work of your career and see your impact at scale.

Job Description

Epiq AI Labs is the innovation and engineering hub behind Epiq's next-generation AI platform for corporate legal departments and global law firms. Operating with the speed and autonomy of a startup and the resources of a global alternative legal services provider, the team builds intelligent agents, reasoning engines, knowledge systems, and structured workflows for litigation, investigations, compliance, and corporate knowledge work. We are fast, experimental, and product-obsessed, with high autonomy, high trust, and low bureaucracy. We ship to real legal clients and hold a high bar for correctness, and we use AI tools throughout our own development workflow. The team is deeply technical, highly collaborative, and owns its systems end to end — you design it, you build it, you ship it.

Opportunity

You will build the agentic systems at the center of Epiq AI Labs’ legal AI platform, including the orchestration runtime used by other teams, the retrieval layer agents reason over, and the evaluation infrastructure used to measure quality. You will own systems from initial design through production operation. Legal workflows require a high standard of correctness, traceability, confidentiality, and tenant isolation. You will establish the primitives for orchestration, grounded retrieval, and measurable quality that other engineering teams will build on.

Essential Job Responsibilities

• Design the agentic platform: orchestration of single agents and parallel sub‑agents, durable state and memory across long-running jobs, MCP-based tool integration, and trace‑level observability.
• Build the safety layer agents run inside: tool registration and permissioning, sandboxing, guardrails and output validation, and defenses against prompt injection from retrieved content.
• Build agent workflows with multi‑step reasoning, tool use, human‑in‑the‑loop checkpoints, and recovery from partial failure during long‑running execution.
• Evaluate developments in model capabilities, agent‑design patterns, and evaluation practices, and translate them into platform architecture.
• Design retrieval‑augmented generation systems with hybrid search over legal corpora and citation grounding to specific sources.
• Own and evolve the in‑house model services behind classification, extraction, and embeddings — including customer‑trained custom models with active learning — and integrate them alongside frontier models.
• Build model‑level and end‑to‑end evaluation datasets, benchmarks, and regression checks for classification, extraction, retrieval, and agent workflows.
• Work with legal domain experts to turn real workflows, corrections, and failure cases into quality improvements, with automated evaluation in CI and monitoring of quality, latency, and cost in production.
• Establish LLMOps practices for running models reliably in production: model routing and fallbacks, latency and cost budgets, prompt and context versioning, caching, and quality and reliability monitoring.
• Use AI coding agents throughout development while owning the outcome — the design, specifications and test plans, code review, and verification of correctness, security, and maintainability — and ship major changes behind automated tests and controlled rollouts, with product and legal‑domain validation where appropriate.
• Build scalable backend services and APIs, produce technical design documentation, and partner with product, research, and security stakeholders.
• Participate in the on‑call rotation; diagnose and resolve production incidents affecting model and agent services, and turn findings into durable fixes.

Senior+ Level Responsibilities

• Define the foundational architecture for running LLM-powered applications and agents reliably in production across teams, and lead the most complex cross‑cutting initiatives, including migrations and addressing architectural debt and systemic risks.
• Raise the engineering bar by promoting best engineering practice, building reusable platform primitives, mentoring engineers, and partnering with product and engineering leaders on technical direction while staying hands‑on and accountable for delivering working software.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software‑engineering experience with demonstrated depth in backend, distributed, or AI systems.
• Hiring level will reflect demonstrated technical depth, scope of ownership, and impact.
• Experience delivering and operating LLM-powered applications in production at scale - beyond prototypes or proofs of concept - including evaluating quality and diagnosing failures.
• Experience building tool‑using agent workflows or retrieval‑augmented generation systems.
• Strong production‑level proficiency in Python.
• Working understanding of the ML lifecycle, including evaluation data, model and dataset versioning, production deployment, and monitoring model quality, with the ability to collaborate with researchers on reliable model updates.
• Experience designing evaluation datasets and benchmarks and measuring agent task completion, citation correctness, policy adherence, latency, and cost.
• Experience designing services and APIs consumed by other engineering teams.
• Experience with observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry.
• Strong system‑design and architecture experience, including production of technical design documents.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to work effectively with non‑technical domain experts and stakeholders.
• Demonstrated proficiency using AI coding agents in day‑to‑day development, with sound judgment about where they accelerate work and where they fail.
• Self‑motivated, with high ownership: you solve problems end to end, actively keep up with new developments in AI, and quickly learn and apply new technologies and approaches to your work, including areas you haven't worked in before.
• Senior+ level: Demonstrated technical leadership at the corresponding level, with a track record of delivering complex distributed systems across multiple teams, and deep expertise in Python, distributed‑systems fundamentals, and event‑driven architectures.
• Senior+ level: Proven ability to lead technical direction across organizational boundaries without direct authority, and to communicate architectural trade‑offs to technical and non‑technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience training, fine‑tuning, or adapting models to domain‑specific tasks, including classification and extraction models and active‑learning loops.
• Experience building or contributing to public or domain‑specific benchmarks for LLMs or agents.
• Experience with large‑scale data pipelines or document‑processing systems.
• Experience with multi‑tenant SaaS architectures and data‑isolation requirements.
• Experience in a startup or scale‑up engineering environment.
• Experience in legal technology, enterprise workflow, or knowledge‑management systems.
• Candidates who meet most, but not all, of the qualifications above are encouraged to apply.

Technology Stack

• Python
• LLM APIs and agent frameworks (Anthropic via Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, in‑house models)
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Qdrant
• Solr
• PostgreSQL
• RabbitMQ
• Azure
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• OpenTelemetry

Compensation

The Compensation range for this role is $180,000 -$285,000 USD annually and may be eligible for an annual bonus.

Eligibility & Work Authorization

In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification form upon hire. Must be authorized to work in the United States for any employer.

Salary Determination Factors

• Location‑based market rate for the role
• Your abilities in relation to the job specification
• Performance during screening and interview
• Pay parity with the wider team in the considered location

Further details about the package will be provided during the initial screening call with the Talent Acquisition Team.

Leadership Compass

• Fosters Relationships & Collaboration
• Build trust‑based partnerships
• Nurture long‑term relationships
• Remove collaboration barriers
• Celebrate cross‑team success
• Engages & Influences
• Inspires action and alignment through clear communication, purposeful influence, and a compelling vision.
• Use storytelling to build buy‑in
• Align communication with organizational goals
• Guild alignment through strong engagement
• Maximizes Performance Sets and reinforces performance standards that drive results, ensure accountability, and align with Epiq's goals.
• Use data to identify improvement opportunities
• Make informed decisions
• Align team goals with broader strategy
• Empower teams to manage their own goals
• Translate vision into clear priorities
• Prepare for disruptions with strong change management
• Achieves Operational Success
• Drives continuous improvement and operational excellence through smart processes, data insights, and quality execution.
• Improve workflows for team efficiency
• Use clear documentation and expectations
• Resolve issues quickly using data and feedback

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

It is Epiq's policy to comply with all applicable equal employment opportunity laws by making all employment decisions without unlawful regard or consideration of any individual’s race, religion, ethnicity, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expressions, transgender status, sexual and other reproductive health decisions, marital status, age, national origin, genetic information, ancestry, citizenship, physical or mental disability, veteran or family status or any other basis protected by applicable national, federal, state, provincial or local law. Epiq's policy prohibits unlawful discrimination based on any of these impermissible bases, as well as any bases or grounds protected by applicable law in each jurisdiction. In addition, Epiq will take affirmative action for minorities, women, covered veterans and individuals with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation during the application process because of a disability, it is available upon request. Epiq is pleased to provide such assistance and no applicant will be penalized as a result of such a request. Pursuant to relevant law, where applicable, Epiq will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

About the Company

Epiq is a leading global provider of integrated technology and services for the legal profession, including eDiscovery, managed services, bankruptcy, class action and mass tort administration, federal regulatory actions and data breach responses. Our innovative solutions are designed to streamline the administration of litigation, investigations, financial transactions, regulatory compliance and other legal matters. Epiq's subject‑matter experts bring clarity to complexity, create efficiency through expertise and deliver confidence to our clients around the world. We strive for a cohesive, collaborative environment that focuses on group achievement. With over 8000 associates worldwide, Epiq operates in 19 countries and over 80 global locations.