Staff AI Engineer

Everlaw; Oakland (CA); On-site; USD 228,000 - 288,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity program

401(k) retirement plan

Health, dental, and vision

FSA for health and dependent care

Job summary

Everlaw in Oakland, CA is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to shape and execute our AI strategy for a trillion-token scale legal tech platform. You will lead a core squad of AI engineers and guide the broader engineering organization.

This role emphasizes collaboration with security, data science, product design, and cloud infrastructure, staying on the cutting edge of frontier models, and mentoring others. If you have 6+ years in ML/AI, 8+ years in software, and proven production experience with

Qualifications

• At least 6 years in ML/AI and 8+ years in software engineering
• Led significant AI projects including production use of LLMs and NLP
• Proficient in a scripting language (Python)
• Strong appetite for continuous learning and knowledge sharing
• Excellent collaboration across teams and functions

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of Everlaw's AI strategy and frontier-model engagements
• Guide engineers across the company in applying AI and sharing learnings
• Collaborate with security, data science, product, and design teams to drive AI leadership
• Identify and prototype AI-enabled opportunities that advance the product and business

Skills

ML/AI experience

Software engineering

LLMs in production

Python scripting

Leadership

Job description

Everlaw is looking for a Staff AI Engineer to help design and execute our overall technical strategy of applying AI in our product, directly contributing to our company’s vision of being the AI leader in legal discovery and litigation technology. AI is central to our product - not a bolt-on or afterthought - and represents a step-function advancement of our company’s mission of promoting justice by illuminating truth. We take the hardest problems of applying AI to complex litigation reasoning tasks, at the scale of millions (or 100s of millions) of documents and multimodal inputs.

In this role, you will help to drive the work of a core squad of AI engineers, as well as providing technical guidance to engineers to level up their AI expertise across the broader engineering organization. You'll also collaborate with (and learn from) a community of other staff and principal engineers with industry-leading expertise in databases and storage technologies, search, cloud infrastructure, full stack SaaS application design, data science, and performance. You'll have regular visibility to, and interactions with, our Chief Technology Officer and other senior leaders at the company.

At Everlaw, engineering is key to our mission. Our company culture is open and vibrant and we're committed to the professional growth of our team members, offering an annual learning and development stipend and regular check-ins with managers regarding career goals. If you're looking for a place that values passion, integrity, thinking big, and a desire to learn, we'd love to hear from you! Think you're missing some of the skills and are hesitant to apply? We do not believe in the 'perfect' candidate and encourage you to apply if you feel you can bring value to our team.

This is a full-time, exempt position located onsite (3 days/week in office) in Oakland, California.

• We want you to feel like part of the team early on! Our onboarding process will integrate you into the company with informative sessions on our product, policies, processes, and team structure and goals.
• We're excited for you to learn, grow, and contribute right away! We trust that you'll bring industry experience and knowledge that will uplift and uplevel the team, but we don't expect you to know everything on Day 1.

In your role, you'll...

• Lead the design and implementation of Everlaw's technical AI strategy. This includes staying on the cutting edge of the latest frontier models. Including participating in early access programs with all the major AI labs (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) to provide direct feedback on unreleased models and API design, as well as staying abreast of evolving open-source offerings. You'll devise our overall approach to using AI at trillion-token scale, including:
• Guide the work of engineers across our company in using AI. We're an organization devoted to constant learning. As one of our staff engineers, you'll lead by example in staying abreast of industry developments and sharing your learnings with the team – whether in structured ways like feedback on design documents or code reviews, or in less formal ways, like giving occasional tech talks or leading a study group on AI research papers.
• Collaborate with other software engineers, security engineers, data scientists, product leads and designers, and other cross-functional teams in the pursuit of our goal of being the AI leader in litigation.
• Be on the lookout for new opportunities that AI enables. Help us spot cases where industry or research progression in ML/AI tech will translate to Legal Tech, and influence our engineering and product direction. We're prepared to act and innovate in bringing the best ideas to market.

About you

• You have at least 6 years of experience working in ML/AI, and 8+ years overall in software engineering
• You have led significant AI projects, including applied use of LLMs in production settings and experience with NLP/text analysis,
• You have programming skills in at least one scripting language (like Python).
• You're a constant learner, staying abreast of the latest AI developments from the industry, and how you might apply these to your work
• You're able to collaborate effectively with coworkers on different teams. You can zoom in to discuss technical details with other experienced AI engineers, and can zoom out to explain technical concepts without jargon. You're willing to share your knowledge and help others learn.

Pluses

• You’ve used Retrieval-based LMs or hybrid approaches with RAG to find answers in very large custom data sets
• You’ve designed approaches for storage and representation of knowledge, and are familiar with vector and graph databases
• You’ve explored multimodal approaches, including image, audio, or video processingYou’ve built agents to accomplish tasks, including approaches for supervision, backtracking, exception handling, tool use, MCP, etc.
• You have previous experience with SaaS and distributed systems.
• The expected salary range for this role is between $228,000 - $288,000. The final offered salary will be dependent upon many factors including the candidate’s experience and skills. The base pay range is subject to change in the future.
• Equity program
• 401(k) retirement plan with company matching
• Health, dental, and vision
• Flexible Spending Accounts for health and dependent care expenses
• Paid parental leave and approximately 10 days (80 hours) per year of sick leave
• Membership toModern Health to help employees prioritize mental health and wellness
• Annual allocation for Learning & Development opportunities and applicable professional membership dues
• Company-sponsored life and disability insurance
• Work in Downtown Oakland, just steps from the BART line and dozens of restaurants
• You will get a powerful Linux laptop and be able to customize your desk setup
• Bond over team lunches and out-of-the-box events
• Time off for company-sponsored volunteer events and 4 paid hours per quarter to volunteer at a charitable organization of your choice
• Take advantage of learning and career development opportunities
• Ranked #9 on Glassdoor's Best Places to Work 2023 for US small and medium companies

At Everlaw, you'll shape how AI re-wires the legal industry, at a category-leading business built on a mission to illuminate the truth.

Everlaw is an equal opportunity employer. We pride ourselves on having a diverse workforce and we do not discriminate against any employee or applicant because of race, creed, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law. We respect the gender, gender identity and gender expression of our applicants and employees, and we honor requests for pronouns. It is our policy to comply with all applicable national, state and local laws pertaining to nondiscrimination and equal opportunity, including theCalifornia Equal Pay Act . Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

When preparing to engage with Everlaw as a candidate, you may use AI tools for research, polishing application materials, and interview prep. However, any assessments (unless explicitly stated), remote interviews or live interviews must be completed independently without AI support. By submitting your application, you agree to adhere to these rules. Here's the link to our full policy , and please reach out with any questions!

We use Gem as part of our hiring and/or promotional processes. As part of the evaluation process, we provide Gem with job requirements and candidate-submitted applications. Certain features of the platform may qualify it as an Automated Employment Decision Tool (AEDT) under applicable regulations. For positions in New York City, our use of Gem complies with NYC Local Law 144. We began using Gem in April 2026.