Data Scientist (AI/NLP)

Data Scientist (AI/NLP)

Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP (including its associated entities) is an elite global law firm with world-class practices across the board. Clients know they can rely on Davis Polk for their most challenging legal and business matters. From offices in the world's key financial centers and political capitals, our more than 1,000 lawyers collaborate seamlessly to deliver exceptional service, sophisticated advice and creative, practical solutions.

We are seeking a talented and driven Data Scientist (AI/NLP) to join our technology team. This is a high-impact, cross-functional role at the intersection of data science, artificial intelligence, and legal operations. You will develop and deploy advanced NLP and machine learning solutions that transform how the firm manages, retrieves, and leverages its institutional knowledge and legal documents.

This position partners closely with attorneys, legal professionals, and firm leadership to identify opportunities where AI and data science can deliver measurable value — from automating document workflows to building intelligent knowledge management systems.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy machine learning and NLP models to support document understanding, contract analysis, legal research, and knowledge extraction
• Build and maintain intelligent knowledge management systems that organize, surface, and operationalize the firm's institutional knowledge and precedent library
• Apply state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) and generative AI tools to legal workflows, including document classification, summarization, entity extraction, and semantic search
• Partner with attorneys and business professionals to translate complex legal requirements into structured data science solutions
• Write clean, production-quality code and build scalable data pipelines that integrate with firm systems and infrastructure
• Evaluate, implement, and continuously improve AI/ML tools, frameworks, and vendor solutions relevant to the legal industry
• Define and track model performance metrics, communicate results clearly to both technical teams and business stakeholders, and drive iterative model improvement
• Present findings, model outputs, and project updates clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Contribute to the firm's AI strategy and governance by staying current on developments in legal AI, data privacy, and responsible use of AI
• Collaborate with IT infrastructure, security, and application teams to ensure solutions meet firm standards for reliability, security, and compliance

Qualifications/Position Requirements

• Direct experience working in a law firm, legal technology company, or enterprise NLP environment
• Deep expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) — including text classification, named entity recognition, semantic similarity, summarization, and document parsing
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and transformer-based architectures (e.g., GPT, BERT, or similar) and proficiency in Hugging Face and LangChain frameworks
• Strong proficiency in Python and relevant ML/data science libraries (scikit-learn, PyTorch, spaCy, etc.)
• Experience building and deploying end-to-end machine learning pipelines in production environments
• Solid understanding of vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures
• Experience defining and tracking model performance metrics (e.g., precision, recall, F1, ROUGE) to evaluate and communicate model effectiveness to technical and non-technical audiences
• Demonstrated ability to manage and process large, unstructured datasets
• Familiarity with at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS, or GCP)
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to work across technical and non-technical teams
• Strong analytical and problem-solving ability with a rigorous, detail-oriented approach

Education and/or Experience

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Linguistics, Statistics, or a related quantitative field
• 5–7 years of experience in data science, machine learning, or AI engineering roles

Compensation

The expected base salary for this position ranges from $200,000-240,000. Salary offers are based on a wide range of factors including relevant skills, training, experience, education, anticipated assignment, and, where applicable, licensure or certifications obtained. Market and organizational factors are also considered. Davis Polk offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.