Senior Python Engineer

Engineering At Lawhive

We are a team of 40 engineers and researchers, responsible for architecting, building and running Lawhive's platform, relied on by hundreds of legal professionals every day in the UK, US, and beyond. There are lots of problems we have yet to solve, and plenty we're not aware of yet! In the next 12 months, we're focused on:

• Pushing the envelope on the user experience of lawyers' AI interactions. We're not satisfied with "chat" as a default and are inventing a new paradigm for human/machine interaction

• Building modularity and country independence into the heart of our platform. We've recently expanded to the US and are building the world's first global consumer law firm

Full stack AI-native legal services: we're not only building software, we're an AI-native law firm

The Role

We're looking for a Senior Python Engineer to join our AI Engineering & Infrastructure team to bring our latest AI-driven features and services into production. Deploying them at scale, improving infrastructure, and ensuring robustness in production. You'll work closely with AI researchers, software engineers, and product teams to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and real-world applications.

Responsibilities

• Developing production-ready APIs and services that expose AI functionality to internal and external applications.

• Improving reliability & monitoring for AI-driven applications in production.

• Scaling AI systems to handle real-world legal use cases (e.g., legal document analysis, case predictions, automated legal advice).

• Collaborating with AI engineers to ensure smooth deployment of AI workflows and models into production.

• Working with event-driven architectures and async workflows to process large-scale AI workloads efficiently.

• Ensuring security & compliance in AI-driven legal services.

Requirements

• Strong Python experience in building scalable backend systems.

• Familiarity with API design & distributed systems architecture.

• Experience working with event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka, Pub/Sub, AWS Step Functions, etc.).

• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP etc).

• Understanding of best practices in observability, monitoring, and debugging.

Nice to Have

• LLM Observability & Evaluation – familiarity with tools such as Langfuse for monitoring model generations, managing prompts, and measuring quality in production.

• Comfortable optimising performance & scaling distributed AI workloads and ML Ops experience.

• Full-stack Typescript experience.

• Hands-on work with vector databases, hybrid retrieval methods, and evaluation of retrieval quality.

• Agentic & Orchestrated Systems – exposure to multi-step reasoning, agent frameworks, or orchestration tools (e.g. LangChain, AutoGen, Inngest, Temporal) where LLMs call tools, plan tasks, or coordinate workflows.

• Experience working in collaboration with researchers so that new models, pipelines, or research outputs can be integrated and evolved iteratively.

• Prior Experience in Legal Tech - understanding of the legal industry and experience working with legal technology solutions.

Interview Process

• Introductory call with our Talent team

• 1:1 with your hiring manager

• Live technical assessment - systems design and pairing with two of our engineers

• Values interview with our CTO/Co-founder

• We offer!

UK Benefits: Meaningful early-stage equity at one of Europe's fastest growing startups

33 days' annual leave (25 + bank holidays) plus your birthday off

Work from anywhere for a month

Pension contribution via Nest

Top-spec equipment - MacBook/Windows

Regular team building activities and socials!

Diversity at Lawhive

At Lawhive, we know that diversity of thought is critical to delivering outlier outcomes. As such, we're always working hard to ensure we build a diverse, inclusive team, and as we scale, we'll only ever increase the focus we apply to this.