AI Engineer

The AI Engineer role at Dechert LLP is based onsite in Philadelphia, PA and focuses on designing, building, and deploying secure AI enabled solutions that enhance the delivery of legal services and firm operations, in partnership with attorneys, legal professionals, and business services teams.

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 outcomes.
• Lead technical discovery sessions and evaluate opportunities for AI, automation, workflow optimization, integration, and custom applications.
• Rapidly design and prototype proof of concept and pilot solutions using approved AI platforms, APIs, low code tools, workflow automation platforms, and custom development technologies.
• Develop secure AI enabled applications including generative AI assistants, document and knowledge search tools, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications, workflow copilots, intelligent agents, and decision support systems.
• Create and maintain integrations among firm applications, document repositories, knowledge systems, data platforms, collaboration tools, and approved third party services.
• Design AI solutions that address 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 meet global standards prior to production deployment.
• Evaluate and select technical approaches based on business value, solution complexity, data sensitivity, scalability, supportability, and time to value.
• Develop reusable components, integration patterns, prompt libraries, evaluation methods, documentation, and technical standards to accelerate future AI and automation work.
• Conduct testing, quality assurance, user acceptance testing, model evaluation, and performance monitoring for AI enabled solutions.
• Establish measures of success including 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 and operations or enterprise development with clear ownership and lifecycle plans.
• Monitor deployed solutions for performance, reliability, adoption, model behavior, security concerns, and opportunities for iterative improvement.
• Stay current on AI engineering practices, legal industry AI use cases, emerging tools, governance requirements, and relevant technology trends.
• Participate in intake prioritization, solution estimation, roadmap planning, vendor evaluations, and innovation portfolio reporting.
• Collaborate 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 discipline (required; equivalent combinations may be considered).
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in software engineering, application development, automation, systems integration, data engineering, or related technical roles (required).
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (required).
• Experience with enterprise integrations, APIs, identity and access management, secure development practices, and application lifecycle management (required).
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders and delivering technology solutions from discovery through production deployment (required).

Technologies

• Python
• JavaScript / TypeScript
• C#
• ASP.NET Core
• SQL
• Microsoft Azure
• Amazon Web Services
• Azure / OpenAI integration
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• 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