Principal AI Engineer

About the position

Fisher Phillips, a premier international labor and employment law firm, is seeking a Principal AI Product Engineer to join our newly formed AI group. Reporting to the Director of AI, this role will work closely with legal practice groups, business departments, and technology teams to build production-grade generative-AI solutions that enhance decision-making and efficiency across legal and operational departments, including tools that support attorneys and department heads in addressing complex business and compliance challenges. This is a senior, hands-on position for an engineer who owns the full lifecycle: designing data pipelines, training and fine-tuning large language models, hardening services for production, and partnering directly with legal-practice stakeholders to shape the product roadmap.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the hands-on Director of AI to evaluate, implement, and integrate AI tools and services aligned with department and practice group needs.
• Lead the design, development, and deployment of end-to-end AI systems including RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, and agentic workflows that automate legal workflows.
• Own MLOps: CI/CD, model evaluation, monitoring, A/B testing, and rollback strategies.
• Collaborate with attorneys and technical managers to translate legal requirements into technical roadmaps and rapid prototypes.
• Design and secure ingestion of privileged data sets; implement vector databases and retrieval strategies that respect confidentiality and compliance.
• Establish coding standards, testing frameworks, and observability practices; mentor and upskill junior engineers as the team scales.
• Evaluate emerging Gen-AI tools, open-source models, and vendor offerings, providing technical guidance on build-vs-buy decisions.
• Develop scripts, connectors, and automation to bridge functionality gaps and integrate AI services with firm systems (e.g., document management, CRM, case management).
• Design and build prototypes, proof-of-concepts, and lightweight custom solutions to test AI capabilities in the firm's environment.
• Work with APIs and SDKs to enable interoperability between AI platforms and internal systems.
• Assist with technical assessments of AI vendors and services, providing insight into integration feasibility, scalability, and security.
• Support pilots and early adoption efforts by providing technical troubleshooting and ensuring solutions are production-ready.
• Stay informed about emerging AI technologies, APIs, and services relevant to professional services and legal industry applications.
• Document solution architectures, integration approaches, and operational procedures for deployed AI solutions.
• Act as a technical partner to the Director of AI, translating strategic AI initiatives into actionable technical solutions.

Requirements

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field or equivalent professional experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years building and shipping ML/AI systems in production.
• Expert level Python (3.10+) and deep experience with one DL stack (PyTorch or TensorFlow/Keras) and modern Gen-AI tooling (Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain/LlamaIndex, RAG, fine-tuning, RLHF).
• Hands-on cloud proficiency with AWS or GCP, including container orchestration (EKS/ECS, GKE), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CloudFormation), and GPU/accelerator workloads.
• Comfortable designing APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures; fluent working with REST, GraphQL, and gRPC.
• Strong product instincts: proven ability to interview end-users, articulate problem statements, and balance ROI vs. model accuracy.
• Bonus: experience handling regulated or privileged corpora (legal, healthcare, finance) and implementing data-privacy controls.
• Proficiency in Python for scripting, automation, and API integration.
• Hands-on experience working with REST APIs, webhooks, and SDKs.
• Experience configuring and deploying cloud-based AI services or SaaS platforms.
• Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to work independently to research, test, and implement solutions.
• Ability to translate business needs into technical requirements and deliver solutions that align with firm objectives.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience handling regulated or privileged corpora (legal, healthcare, finance) and implementing data-privacy controls.

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) with profit sharing
• Generous paid time off and holidays
• 24/7 telehealth services
• Variety of wellness programs
• Additional optional benefits designed to support unique lifestyles