Principal Software Engineer / Architect – AI – Legal FDE (Legal AI)

Location: Hybrid role based in the United States, with locations including Frisco, Texas; New York, New York; Washington, DC; Eagan, Minnesota; and other eligible US offices.

Base compensation: $158,900–$295,100 USD for eligible US locations; $183,100–$340,000 USD in certain listed locations. Annual bonus may also apply.

Company

hirify.global provides trusted content, software, and intelligence for legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media professionals.

What you will do

• Define the long-term technical vision, strategy, requirements, standards, and roadmap for Forward Deployed Engineering.
• Lead high-risk AI initiatives from concept through production while remaining hands-on in architecture, prototyping, and coding.
• Architect secure, scalable AI systems integrating with document management systems, enterprise platforms, legal technology ecosystems, and third-party AI APIs.
• Design RAG pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, event-driven backends, and agentic workflows using CoCounsel, Westlaw, Practical Law, and related capabilities.
• Set standards for MLOps, LLMOps, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, observability, evaluation, reliability, and production quality.
• Advise legal and technical executives, translate legal reasoning into system benchmarks, mentor engineers, and influence product and engineering strategy.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including deep system design, distributed systems, architecture, and leadership of complex, high-risk projects.
• Extensive experience owning technical requirements and strategy, creating technology roadmaps, and prioritizing competing investments.
• Expert hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML and LLM-powered applications in production.
• Deep proficiency with LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI, or AutoGen, plus expert knowledge of RAG architectures and vector databases.
• Hands-on experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interoperability patterns.
• Expert Python, FastAPI or equivalent, RESTful APIs, asynchronous and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CDK, or equivalent.
• Production observability experience with Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or similar, and AI evaluation experience with LangSmith, Langfuse, Braintrust, W&B, or similar.
• Strong secure API development background using OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and JWT.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot, and experience driving AI-native engineering practices.
• Ability to influence across teams, advise senior leadership, communicate complex ideas, work autonomously in ambiguity, and demonstrate sound judgment and attention to detail.
• Recognized technical role-model and leader with strong stakeholder and cross-domain communication skills.

Nice to have

• Experience in legal, fintech, healthcare, or another regulated industry, including compliance and data privacy requirements.
• Experience building agentic AI systems with autonomous decision-making.
• Familiarity with legal platforms, document management systems, and legal technology ecosystems.
• Docker/Kubernetes and MLOps/LLMOps lifecycle management experience.
• Understanding of transformer model scaling, limitations, and fine-tuning.
• Conference talks, publications, patents, open-source contributions, or standards participation.
• Experience creating vision documents and leading cross-business-unit technology strategy.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible hybrid work model for office-based roles, with work from anywhere available for up to 8 weeks per year.
• Flexible vacation, paid holidays, sick and safe paid time off, parental leave, sabbatical leave, and two company-wide mental health days.
• Health, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, 401(k) with company match, flexible spending and health savings accounts, and employee assistance resources.
• Tuition reimbursement, fitness reimbursement, commuter benefits, adoption and surrogacy assistance, employee stock purchase access, and incentive programs.
• Learning and career development programs, inclusion initiatives, paid volunteer days, and opportunities for pro-bono and ESG work.