Senior AI Research Engineer
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Job Summary
Clio is the global leader in legal AI technology empowering legal professionals and law firms of every size to work smarter faster and more securely.
We are transforming the legal experience for all by bettering the lives of legal professionals while increasing access to justice.
Summary:
Clio signed a definitive agreement to acquire vLex in 2025. This transaction is a major milestone in Clios platform evolution and a turning point for the future of legal work. It combines Clios legal operating system - trusted by more than 200000 legal professionals - with vLexs cutting-edge legal intelligence platform which includes Vincent AI built on the industrys most comprehensive global legal database. Together these platforms establish a new category of intelligent legal technology at the intersection of the business and practice of law empowering legal professionals to seamlessly manage research and execute legal work within a unified system.
Learn more here.
As a Senior AI Research Engineer you will play a key role in developing and advancing Vincent vLexs groundbreaking AI by contributing to applied research experiments that integrate cutting-edge AI - particularly large language models (LLMs) - into real-world legal workflows. You will work closely with software engineers and domain experts on sophisticated technical challenges to deliver innovative solutions that push the boundaries of legal technology.
What youll work on:
Foundations of retrieval at scale: Re-think how we search over vast heterogeneous legal corpora. Exploring new approaches to chunking query augmentation hybrid sparse/dense embeddings contextual embeddings quantisation to push the boundaries of recall speed and efficiency
Learning to rank with legal signals: Experiment with re-ranking strategies for search results that incorporate legal-specific signals that go beyond keyword matches and semantic similarities to surface the most authoritative and relevant results first
Agentic infrastructure for legal workflows: Develop the foundations of agents that can decompose complex legal tasks plan across multiple tools and execute with traceability and guardrails. These are building blocks that underpin future end-to-end automated workflows
Evaluation frameworks for retrieval and agents: Design and run experiments that help us measure system performance against the needs of legal professionals: offline testbeds human-in-the-loop evaluations implicit feedback pipelines and alignment between lab metrics and customer satisfaction
Grounding and validation of model responses: Create mechanisms that ensure model responses are trustworthy by anchoring them in trusted legal sources with clear traceability to supporting evidence and methods for validating cited content and surfacing uncertainty when the model lacks sufficient grounding
A day in the life might look like:
Leading complex research projects focused on LLMs advanced information retrieval and novel AI applications in the legal domain working independently with minimal supervision
Designing and implementing sophisticated prototypes that demonstrate the feasibility and business value of cutting-edge research ideas ensuring they meet production-quality standards
Driving the transition of research innovations from prototype to production collaborating closely with product and engineering teams to ensure successful integration and scalability
Contributing to strategic research planning by identifying high-impact research opportunities and helping prioritize initiatives based on business value and technical feasibility
Staying at the forefront of AI research particularly in NLP LLMs and legal AI actively incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into your work and sharing insights with the team
Lead technical discussions and code reviews ensuring high standards of research quality and implementation across the team
Collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders including product managers legal engineers and business leaders to align research efforts with strategic objectives
Documenting and communicating research findings through internal presentations technical documentation and potentially external publications or conference presentations
Contributing to the development of research infrastructure and best practices that enhance the teams overall efficiency and impact
What you may have
Masters degree or PhD in Computer Science Machine Learning Data Science Artificial Intelligence or a related field
Industry experience in applied AI research or engineering
At least one of the following experiences:
Information retrieval systems
LLM fine-tuning and evaluation
LLM hosting and inference optimization
LLM workflow automation using prompt engineering prompt chaining techniques and agent orchestration frameworks
Track record of independently delivering complex technical projects from ideation to implementation
Hands-on experience in working closely with product engineering in production applications
Proficiency in data manipulation cleaning and pre-processing for complex unstructured data sets
A proven ability to quickly learn new technologies and adapt to a fast-paced environment with distributed teams and customers
A strong understanding of modern AI tools and approaches
Clear communication skills and the ability to build trust with both internal teams and external customers
A desire to continuously learn challenge yourself and refine your craft
A deep interest in how technology transforms the legal industry is highly valuable
What you will find here:
Compensation is one of the main components of Clios Total Rewards Program. We have developed a series of programs and processes to ensure we are creating fair and competitive pay practices that form the foundation of our human and high-performing culture.
Some highlights of our Total Rewards program include:
Competitive equitable salary with top-tier health benefits and dental coverage.
Hybrid work environment with expectation for local Clions (Vancouver Calgary Toronto Dublin and Sydney) to be in office min. twice per week.
Flexible time off policy
Pension contribution
Clioversary recognition program with special acknowledgement at 3 5 7 and 10 years
Please note salary bands may differ based on location and local currency. Additionally benefits may differ depending on the employees location.
Diversity Inclusion Belonging and Equity (DIBE) & Accessibility
Our team shows up as their authentic selves and are united by our mission. We are dedicated todiversity equity and inclusion. We pride ourselves in building and fostering an environment where our teams feel included valued and enabled to do the best work of their careers wherever they choose to log in from. We believe that different perspectives skills backgrounds and experiences result in higher-performing teams and better innovation. We are committed to equal employment and we encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.
Clio provides accessibility accommodations during the recruitment process. Should you require any accommodation please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.
Disclaimer: We only communicate with candidates through official @ email addresses.
Required Experience:
Senior IC
Key Skills
About Company
Run your law firm with Clio, the #1 choice of legal professionals for managing clients, cases, billing, and more. Try it for free today—no credit card required.
