Senior Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure

Overview

This role is open to candidates in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, LA, Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

The Cornerstone Research Data Science Center is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, harden, and scale infrastructure that powers AI applications across the firm. This is a hands-on role within a versatile software engineering team that operates with a high degree of autonomy and scope.

You will co-own the platform layer beneath the firm’s AI tooling, including inference gateways, containerized environments, and observability tools. The work is a mix of building new capabilities and hardening existing infrastructure in a domain where confidentiality, isolation, and reliability are critical.

This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys building products and services for other developers: someone equally comfortable standing up a new service, tracing a request across the platform to determine why it was slow, figuring out why a container works locally and fails on the host, and replacing a manual deployment step with a pipeline. You will work closely with engineers who own the platform layer and developers who build on it.

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS

• Platform Ownership: Design, build, and operate the systems and shared infrastructure that AI applications at the firm depend on.
• Observability & Reliability: Own metrics, logs, and traces for the platform. Instrument services, build dashboards and alerts, and use telemetry to diagnose and resolve performance and reliability issues.
• Hardening & Operations: Improve the resilience, security posture, and operational maturity of existing systems.
• Developer Enablement: Provide the tooling, environments, and deployment paths that let application developers ship AI agents and workflows onto the platform quickly and safely. Treat internal developers as your users.
• Collaboration: Partner with engineers, data scientists, product managers, and corporate departments (Security, IT) to understand requirements, communicate tradeoffs, and deliver platform capabilities that fit how the firm works.

EXPERIENCE/SKILLS/EDUCATION

Required

• Experience: BA/BS with 4+ years of professional software, platform, infrastructure, or DevOps engineering experience, OR a Master or PhD in a quantitative field (e.g., Computer Science, Math, Economics) with 2+ years of industry experience.
• Engineering Mindset: Strong fundamentals in system design, with the ability to build reliable systems that handle sensitive data with high reliability.
• Technical Versatility: Demonstrated ability to work across tech stacks and pick up new languages or frameworks quickly
• AI-Native Development: Experience using AI-powered coding assistants to accelerate development; strong interest in staying at the forefront of AI-enabled engineering.
• Agentic Tooling: Familiarity with building AI agents (e.g., using the Claude Agent SDK), and with what it takes to run agents safely in sandboxed environments.
• Containers: Deep, practical experience with environment isolation concepts and container solutions such as Docker, Podman, or Bubblewrap
• Observability: Hands-on experience with metrics, logging, and distributed tracing, ideally with the Grafana ecosystem (Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Alloy) and OpenTelemetry.
• Communication: Ability to clearly articulate technical tradeoffs, document systems well, and explain progress to both technical peers and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred

• Reverse Proxies & Gateways: Experience configuring and operating reverse proxies or API gateways (e.g., Nginx): routing, TLS, authentication, rate limiting, and request/response handling.
• Networking & Service Connectivity : Solid grasp of how services find and talk to each other across hosts and networks, including gRPC, and similar protocols, TCP and TLS, DNS and service discovery, ports and subnets.

• CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code : Experience with GitLab CI or similar pipelines, and with infrastructure-as-code or configuration management tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Orchestration : Exposure to Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems, and an informed view on when they are and are not the right tool.
• Hybrid Environments : Experience operating across on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
• Identity & Secrets : Familiarity with SSO/OIDC, identity and access management, secrets management, and audit logging.
• Regulated or Professional Services Environments: Experience building infrastructure within professional services, legal, financial, or highly regulated industries.

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

• Resume
• Cover Letter
• Code Portfolio (optional, if applicable please upload under “Additional Documents”)

Cornerstone Research will provide visa support to full-time candidates. If you are applying from within the US, candidates should have at least 12 months remaining of work authorization.

ABOUT CORNERSTONE RESEARCH

Cornerstone Research is at the forefront of economic and financial consulting, delivering the rigorous analytical solutions required to navigate complex disputes. The firm draws from an extensive network of prominent academic and industry experts to support each matter effectively. Pairing a deep understanding of economics and finance with a suite of industry-leading artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, Cornerstone provides clients with a sophisticated, tailored approach. A reputation for innovation, precision, and excellence has defined Cornerstone since 1989. That momentum continues with over 1,000 professionals collaborating across nine offices in the US, UK, and EU.

ABOUT DATA SCIENCE CENTER

The Data Science Center (DSC) is the Cornerstone Research's center of excellence for advanced analytics, data infrastructure, and AI-enabled innovation. The DSC sits at the intersection of economics, data science, and litigation. We partner with consultants to build practical, AI-powered products that reshape how Cornerstone delivers. The DSC brings together deep domain expertise, direct access to real user problems, and strong distribution channels, creating the conditions for legal technology that lasts.

Cornerstone Research offers a market-leading compensation and benefits package. The base salary for the Senior Software Engineer role is $215,000-$235,000. In addition to the base salary, new Software Engineers will be eligible for a signing bonus depending on skills, education, and experience. Software Engineers are also eligible for discretionary bonuses based on case performance, firm contributions, and other factors. Previous relevant work experience will be taken into consideration in determining compensation. Information about our benefits, including health and wellness and family support, can be found on the Careers page of our website.

Cornerstone Researchprovides Equal Employment Opportunities to allemployees and applicants for employment without regard to legally protected categories, such as age, sex, gender, gender identity, race, color, creed/religious belief, medical condition, predisposing genetic characteristics or genetic information or testing, disability, marital status, pregnancy status, military status, veteran status, arrest or conviction record (except where permitted by law), sexual orientation, ethnic background, citizen status, ancestry, national origin, or any other consideration protected by federal, state or local law.