AI Engineer

Dechert's Innovation Lab in New York is seeking an AI Engineer to help uncover, prototype, and pilot AI-enabled technologies that enhance how legal services are delivered and how the firm operates. This role collaborates closely with attorneys and diverse business teams to translate needs into testable prototypes and pilots, guiding ideas from discovery through initial deployments. It emphasizes hands-on experimentation, rapid prototyping, and evidence-based evaluation within a professional services context.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with attorneys, practice groups, legal project management, knowledge management, finance, risk, client development, and business-services teams to identify innovation opportunities, map workflows, pain points, and desired outcomes.
• Lead technical discovery and innovation sessions; assess business problems for AI, automation, and emerging technologies.
• Rapidly design, build, and evaluate proof-of-concept and pilot solutions using approved and emerging AI platforms, APIs, low-code tools, workflow automation platforms, and custom development technologies.
• Create and test experimental AI-enabled applications, including generative AI assistants, document and knowledge-search solutions, RAG applications, workflow copilots, intelligent agents, and decision-support tools.
• Evaluate and select appropriate technical approaches based on innovation potential, business value, solution complexity, data sensitivity, scalability, supportability, and time-to-value.
• Experiment with solution success measures such as feasibility, time savings, adoption potential, accuracy, user satisfaction, process-cycle reduction, risk reduction, and business impact.
• Evaluate pilot outcomes and advise whether to transition successful experiments to the relevant enterprise application teams.
• Continuously monitor AI engineering practices, legal-industry AI use cases, emerging tools and platforms, AI governance requirements, and technology trends; recommend new technologies for future evaluation.
• Participate in intake prioritization, solution estimation, innovation pipeline planning, vendor evaluations, and portfolio reporting.
• Other responsibilities as needed.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical discipline.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in software engineering, application development, automation, systems integration, data engineering, rapid prototyping, or related technical roles.
• Experience working with cross-functional stakeholders and delivering technology solutions from discovery and experimentation through pilot and production deployment.

Technologies

• Python
• JavaScript/TypeScript
• C#
• ASP.NET Core
• SQL
• APIs, SDKs
• Orchestration frameworks
• Cloud services
• Enterprise platforms
• Microsoft Azure
• Amazon Web Services
• OpenAI, Claude
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• LLM, prompt engineering
• Retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings
• Vector databases, AI agents, RAG architectures
• Vector search technologies
• Workflow platforms, robotic process automation
• Low-code/no-code development tools, integration platforms
• Microservices, web applications
• Databases, authentication, authorization
• Logging, monitoring, testing, CI/CD practices

Location

New York, NY (onsite). Additional locations include Boston, MA; Philadelphia, PA; and Washington, DC.

Time Type

Full time

Salary Information

Salary range: $140,000 - $175,000 per year. The posted range applies to locations including Boston, New York, and Washington, DC; actual compensation is commensurate with knowledge, skills, experience, and location.