Senior Applied AI Engineer

Sequel; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - GBP 140,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech startup in the UK seeks a Senior Applied AI Engineer to enhance AI features and services. Key responsibilities include developing APIs for AI functionality, ensuring application reliability, and scaling AI systems to handle legal use cases. Ideal candidates will have strong Python experience, familiarity with API design, and exposure to event-driven architectures. The role promises meaningful equity, 33 days of annual leave, and competitive compensation ranging from £90K to £140K.

Benefits

Meaningful early-stage equity

33 days' annual leave

Pension contribution via Nest

20% off legal fees

Top-spec equipment

Qualifications

• Strong Python experience in building scalable backend systems.
• Familiarity with API design and distributed systems architecture.
• Experience working with event-driven architectures.

Responsibilities

• Develop production-ready APIs and services exposing AI functionality.
• Improve reliability & monitoring for AI-driven applications.
• Scale AI systems for real-world legal use cases.

Skills

Strong Python experience

Familiarity with API design

Event-driven architectures

Cloud platforms experience

Best practices in observability

Tools

Kafka

AWS

GCP

Job description

About Lawhive

We're on a mission to make sure everyone has access to the law.

Lawhive is an online platform for consumers and small businesses to get legal help for a fraction of the cost of a law firm. Our platform combines regulated human lawyers collaborating alongside the world’s first AI lawyer, specifically built for consumer legal work.

Equal access to the law is one of the biggest and most pressing unsolved problems in society today. We’re passionate about leveling the playing field and believe access to the law should be a basic utility in society.

Our AI lawyer Lawrence is built on top of our own fine tuned LLM and recently passed the UK’s bar exam equivalent.

We’re backed by some of the top US and UK VC funds including Google Ventures, Balderton Capital and TQ Ventures. We recently secured a $40M Series A funding round to facilitate international expansion and to grow our team, representing one of the five largest Series A rounds in Europe for 2024.

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to join our AI Engineering & Infrastructure team to bring our latest AI-driven features and services into production. Deploying them at scale, improving infrastructure, and ensuring robustness in production. You’ll work closely with AI researchers, software engineers, and product teams to bridge the gap between cutting‑edge AI research and real‑world applications.

Responsibilities

• Develop production‑ready APIs and services that expose AI functionality to internal and external applications.
• Improve reliability & monitoring for AI‑driven applications in production.
• Scale AI systems to handle real‑world legal use cases (e.g., legal document analysis, case predictions, automated legal advice).
• Collaborate with AI engineers to ensure smooth deployment of AI workflows and models into production.
• Work with event‑driven architectures and async workflows to process large‑scale AI workloads efficiently.
• Ensure security & compliance in AI‑driven legal services.

Requirements

• Strong Python experience in building scalable backend systems.
• Familiarity with API design & distributed systems architecture.
• Experience working with event‑driven architectures (e.g. Kafka, Pub/Sub, AWS Step Functions, etc.).
• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP etc).
• Understanding of best practices in observability, monitoring, and debugging.

Nice to Have

• LLM Observability & Evaluation – familiarity with tools such as Langfuse for monitoring model generations, managing prompts, and measuring quality in production.
• Comfortable optimizing performance & scaling distributed AI workloads and ML Ops experience.
• Full‑stack Typescript experience.
• Hands‑on work with vector databases, hybrid retrieval methods, and evaluation of retrieval quality.
• Agentic & Orchestrated Systems – exposure to multi‑step reasoning, agent frameworks, or orchestration tools (e.g. LangChain, AutoGen, Inngest, Temporal) where LLMs call tools, plan tasks, or coordinate workflows.
• Experience working in collaboration with researchers so that new models, pipelines, or research outputs can be integrated and evolved iteratively.
• Prior Experience in Legal Tech - understanding of the legal industry and experience working with legal technology solutions.

UK Benefits:

💰 Meaningful early‑stage equity at one of Europe’s fastest growing startups

✈️ 33 days’ annual leave (25 + bank holidays) plus your birthday off

💰 Pension contribution via Nest

💷 20% off legal fees through Lawhive

💻 Top‑spec equipment - MacBook/Windows

⛳️ Regular team building activities and socials!

Diversity at Lawhive

At Lawhive, we know that diversity of thought is critical to delivering outlier outcomes. As such, we’re always working hard to ensure we build a diverse, inclusive team, and as we scale, we’ll only ever increase the focus we apply to this.

Compensation Range: £90K - £140K