Lead AI Data Scientist (Legal AI)

Location: Hybrid from the central London office, United Kingdom. Visa sponsorship and relocation support are not available.

Company

A fast-growing, private equity-backed legal services group bringing together regional law firms across the UK and rolling out a centralised AI platform.

What you will do

• Identify high-impact opportunities for AI and automation in legal workflows with lawyers, subject matter experts, business analysts, and engineers.
• Prototype LLM-based solutions and evaluate them through human-in-the-loop review and LLM-as-judge methods, then guide successful solutions into production.
• Map matter, client, document, time-recording, and billing data and help define the target data model.
• Set success metrics and build before-and-after analyses and dashboards covering productivity, quality, cost, and margin.
• Monitor production models and AI-enabled workflows for quality degradation and drift.
• Build the data science function as the first data scientist and hire additional team members.

Requirements

• 5+ years of data science experience, including experience leading or setting direction for data science work.
• Track record of taking models from prototype into production and maintaining them in operation.
• Hands-on experience building and evaluating LLM solutions, including prompt design, RAG, and structured evaluation.
• Strong Python and SQL skills, plus experience with a cloud data platform such as Databricks, Azure, or Snowflake.
• Experience defining success metrics and demonstrating measurable business impact.
• Excellent stakeholder skills, including translating workflows into testable AI proposals and explaining trade-offs to senior non-technical audiences.
• Experience mentoring or managing others, or a clear ambition to move into people leadership.

Nice to have

• Professional services, legal, or legal tech experience.
• Experience in a regulated, data-driven industry such as financial services or insurance.
• Experience in a PE-backed or investor-owned environment.
• Familiarity with ShareDo, Clio, Aderant, Jylo, Lexis Protégé, or Copilot.
• Awareness of confidentiality, privilege, and data-protection considerations when applying AI to client data.
• Exposure to agents, MCP, or context engineering.

Culture & Benefits

• Permanent, full-time position with a hybrid work arrangement.
• Founding data science role with responsibility for building and growing the function.
• Production-focused environment where models are expected to deliver measurable business outcomes.
• Direct influence over AI adoption across a UK-wide legal services group.
• Visa sponsorship and relocation support are not available.