Innovation Lead AI Developer

At Kirkland & Ellis, we don’t just meet the standard for legal excellence — we set it. Our culture is built on teamwork, ingenuity and an unwavering commitment to continuous growth. We tackle the most sophisticated legal challenges with bold ideas and innovative solutions, powered by the exceptional experience and ambition of our 7,000+ people, including 4,000+ attorneys, across 24 offices worldwide. Our dedicated professionals share our lawyers’ commitment to excellence and show up each day to do meaningful work that helps drive global business, investment and innovation forward.

Do you want to apply advanced artificial intelligence engineering to transform how a leading law firm serves clients and operates its business?

As an Innovation Lead AI Developer, you’ll join Innovation Engineering to build intelligent products and data-driven solutions that improve quality, speed, and decision-making across legal work and firm operations. This firm-wide role reports to Innovation Engineering leadership and owns the technical direction, architecture, and delivery quality of a workstream or product family within the artificial intelligence portfolio.

You’ll remain hands-on with complex technical work while guiding assigned engineers, partnering with attorneys and business leaders, and establishing secure, scalable foundations in fast-moving or newly built environments. This is a lead individual contributor position with no formal direct reports and occasional travel. The schedule for this position is: Monday through Friday from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm, with hours that may vary. • Define and document architecture, platform choices, system boundaries, integration patterns, and engineering standards for an assigned workstream or product family. • Stay substantially hands-on by developing the highest-risk or most novel components and creating reusable templates, libraries, evaluation tools, and deployment patterns. • Review designs, sequence engineers’ work, remove technical blockers, and serve as the escalation point for complex architecture and design decisions. • Translate ambiguous legal and business needs into clear technical plans with measurable outcomes, milestones, and success criteria. • Oversee evaluation results, security, monitoring, maintainability, incident response, documentation, and the overall health of production solutions. • Lead build-versus-adopt assessments and conduct technical diligence on vendor platforms and third-party tools. • Lead discovery and roadmap discussions with partners, practice group leaders, business unit heads, embedded teams, and Information Technology (IT), explaining technical choices and trade-offs in clear language. • Collaborate constructively with external consultants, vendor engineering teams, and forward-deployed engineers to support successful joint delivery. • Mentor developers at multiple career levels, provide input on their growth, and contribute reusable insights to shared standards, playbooks, and training.