AI Engineer

The AI Engineer role at Dechert LLP focuses on designing, building, and deploying secure AI powered solutions that enhance the delivery of legal services and improve firm operations. This position collaborates closely with attorneys, practice groups, and business-services teams to translate workflows into effective AI and automation outcomes.

Location

Philadelphia, PA (onsite)

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with attorneys, practice groups, legal project management, knowledge management, finance, risk, client development, and business-services teams to map workflows, identify pain points, and define desired results.
• Lead technical discovery sessions and evaluate business problems for AI, automation, workflow optimization, integration opportunities, and custom applications.
• Rapidly prototype and develop proof-of-concept and pilot solutions using approved AI platforms, APIs, low-code tools, workflow automation platforms, and custom development technologies.
• Build secure AI enabled applications, including generative AI assistants, document and knowledge search solutions, retrieval augmented generation, workflow copilots, intelligent agents, and decision support tools.
• Develop and maintain integrations among firm applications, document repositories, knowledge systems, data platforms, collaboration tools, and approved third-party services.
• Design AI solutions with attention to data classification, confidentiality, ethical use, model limitations, human review, auditability, access controls, retention, and regulatory obligations.
• Coordinate with enterprise solutions architecture, information security, privacy, records management, risk management, and legal teams to ensure solutions meet global standards prior to production deployment.
• Assess and select technical approaches based on business value, complexity, data sensitivity, scalability, supportability, and time to value.
• Create reusable components, integration patterns, prompt libraries, evaluation methods, documentation, and technical standards to accelerate future AI and automation delivery.
• Conduct testing, quality assurance, user acceptance testing, model evaluation, and performance monitoring for AI enabled solutions.
• Define and track solution success metrics such as time savings, adoption, accuracy, user satisfaction, process cycle reduction, risk reduction, and business impact.
• Produce technical documentation, architecture diagrams, support materials, operating procedures, and knowledge transfer artifacts.
• Transition mature solutions to appropriate applications support, operations, or enterprise development teams with clear ownership and lifecycle plans.
• Monitor deployed solutions for performance, reliability, adoption, model behavior, security concerns, and opportunities for iterative improvement.
• Stay informed on AI engineering practices, legal industry AI use cases, emerging tools, governance requirements, and technology trends.
• Participate in intake prioritization, solution estimation, roadmap planning, vendor evaluations, and innovation portfolio reporting.
• Partner with Legal, Risk, Security, and Compliance teams to ensure AI initiatives meet applicable legal and regulatory obligations.
• Ensure AI systems handling client or confidential information comply with privacy, security, and data handling requirements across operating jurisdictions.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in software engineering, application development, automation, systems integration, data engineering, or related technical roles.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.
• Experience with enterprise integrations, APIs, identity and access management, secure development practices, and application lifecycle management.
• Proven ability to work with cross functional stakeholders and deliver technology solutions from discovery through production deployment.

Technologies

• Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, ASP.NET Core, SQL
• Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services
• Azure/OpenAI, Large Language Model (LLM), Microsoft CoPilot
• Model Context Protocol (MCP), prompt engineering, retrieval augmented generation, embeddings
• Vector databases, AI agents, RAG architectures, vector search technologies
• React, Robotic Process Automation, low-code/no-code development tools
• Workflow platforms, integration platforms, CI/CD