Junior Generative AI Engineer

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP is a global law firm with an internal team that builds bespoke AI solutions for legal work. The Junior Generative AI Engineer will help prototype, build, test, and deploy LLM-powered products for analyzing complex legal documents, while collaborating with engineers, data scientists, lawyers, and product specialists.

What you'll do:

• Contribute to production AI systems: Under the guidance of senior engineers, help build, test, and improve LLM-powered document analysis features (extraction, classification, risk flagging) that serve lawyers daily
• Data Preparation & Engineering: Help clean, structure, and label legal data to power our AI systems — building the data pipelines that make models work well in practice
• Build features within agent workflows: Implement bounded components of multi-step AI workflows for legal tasks (e.g. due diligence, contract review) — writing tool integrations, prompt chains, and retrieval logic under the supervision of senior engineers
• Support evaluation, quality, and performance: Write test cases, contribute to automated eval pipelines, and help maintain regression suites. Gain exposure to model selection, token budgets, caching strategies, and the guardrails (output filters, PII redaction) that keep production AI systems reliable
• Collaborate with lawyers, engineers, and product: Participate in cross-functional sessions to understand legal workflows, contribute to acceptance criteria, and iterate based on user feedback and evaluation results
• Dedicated mentor: A senior engineer assigned as your day-to-day mentor for at least your first six months — available for architecture discussions, code review, and career guidance
• Structured onboarding: A 90-day onboarding plan covering our stack, legal domain fundamentals, and AI evaluation practices so you're never left guessing what to learn next
• Pair programming: Regular pair-programming sessions with senior engineers on production features — the fastest way to absorb patterns, tooling, and judgement
• Code review as learning: Every pull request receives a thorough, constructive review. You'll also review others' code early on, reading good code is one of the best ways to write it
• AI safety and bias training: Guided training on identifying non-deterministic failure modes, prompt injection risks, bias in LLM outputs, and the responsible-AI practices that govern our systems
• Growth path: A clear progression framework from Junior to Mid-Level to Senior, with regular check-ins, stretch goals, and the opportunity to take on increasing ownership as your skills develop

What they're looking for:

• Some software development experience (internships, co-ops, or substantial academic/personal projects count), including hands-on exposure to LLM/GenAI tools or APIs and some experience working with text data (parsing PDFs or HTML, basic text processing, or using an LLM for extraction or classification)
• Solid Python skills and comfort with basic SQL
• Conceptual understanding of how RAG pipelines work
• Familiarity with at least one LLM API (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar)
• Basic familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure) and an understanding of how to evaluate generative AI outputs (accuracy, faithfulness, hallucination)
• Strong communication skills: ability to explain what you've built, ask good questions, and clearly describe problems and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical teammates
• Ideally some hands-on experience
• Exposure to an orchestration framework (LangChain, LlamaIndex) or a vector database is a plus
• Experience in a hackathon, open-source project, or fast-paced team environment where you shipped working software quickly
• A degree (Bachelor's or Master's) in Computer Science, Mathematics, Computational Linguistics, or a related quantitative field
• Hands-on experience with a vector database or retrieval system (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, FAISS)
• Curiosity about model-serving infrastructure (vLLM, TGI) or how open-source models are deployed — you don't need production experience, but interest matters

Benefits:

• Remote-first team
• Dedicated mentor: A senior engineer assigned as your day-to-day mentor for at least your first six months — available for architecture discussions, code review, and career guidance
• Structured onboarding: A 90-day onboarding plan covering our stack, legal domain fundamentals, and AI evaluation practices so you're never left guessing what to learn next
• Regular pair-programming sessions with senior engineers on production features
• Every pull request receives a thorough, constructive review
• AI safety and bias training
• A clear progression framework from Junior to Mid-Level to Senior, with regular check-ins, stretch goals, and the opportunity to take on increasing ownership as your skills develop
• Comprehensive benefits package, including health care benefits