Lead AI Engineer
About The Position
Sweet James Accident Attorneys is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to own the direction, standards, and health of its in-house AI platform and lead the engineers who build it. This is a player-coach role for a staff-level engineer ready to manage: the person in this position will set architecture, translate the roadmap into an executable build plan, and remain hands-on in the code. The platform supports an AI-forward legal-services operation, with systems including document intake and filing, fact extraction, case search, an internal assistant and agents, and voice agents. The Lead AI Engineer reports to the Chief Technology Officer and owns how the platform is built and operated. The Chief Technology Officer and product leadership set the roadmap; this role determines how to implement it. The position is based on-site at Sweet James Headquarters in Newport Beach, California, on the Technology team. The stated base salary range is $200,000 to $250,000, depending on experience.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of experience building production software, with a track record as technical lead on systems other engineers depended on.
- Experience mentoring, conducting design reviews, and owning a team's output; formal people-management experience is welcome but not required.
- Experience shipping LLM systems to real users, covering prompt and tool design, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, and cost and latency tuning.
- Strong Python and TypeScript/Node skills; production SQL in Postgres; Docker; containerized cloud services (Azure preferred); CI/CD; and monitoring.
- Experience owning uptime, including on-call, incident reviews, and rollbacks.
- Ability to write clear design documents and runbooks and explain technical topics in plain language to non-engineers.
Nice To Haves
- Production-scale experience with Anthropic Claude and OpenAI APIs.
- Experience with agent frameworks or the Model Context Protocol.
- Experience with vector search, such as pgvector.
- Experience with self-hosted or open-weight models, such as vLLM or Baseten.
- Experience with workflow automation platforms such as n8n.
- Knowledge of Salesforce data models and APIs; Litify experience is a plus.
- Experience with voice AI and telephony, such as Retell, Twilio, or Zoom.
- Experience in legal, insurance, or healthcare.
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture of the AI platform and review every major design before it is built.
- Define engineering delivery standards, including code review, testing, and evaluation sets that AI features must pass before release.
- Own platform uptime, monitoring, incident response, and access controls, and ensure systems do not depend on a single person.
- Allocate team capacity against priorities set by the Chief Technology Officer, make trade-offs when demand exceeds capacity, and coach, review, and hire engineers.
- Ship production code every week.
- Partner with attorneys, case managers, and operations leaders to identify worthwhile automation, and report results using hours returned, error rates, and adoption.
- Set data governance rules for least-privilege access, audit trails, and which client and medical data may reach which model.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
