AI Native Engineer, Legalist
Technology-powered investment firm
Be an early applicant
Technology-powered investment firm
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
21-100 employees
Company mission
To level the playing field in litigation by helping plaintiffs in meritorious lawsuits see justice.
Role
Who you are
- Our ideal candidate operates in a fast-paced environment and can take a business problem or idea, figure out the technical approach, build a solution, and iterate quickly
- 3+ years of professional software development experience
- Hands-on experience building applications with LLM APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar
- Experience building AI agents, tool-calling workflows, or other agentic systems
- Strong understanding of APIs, backend development, databases, and cloud infrastructure
- Experience taking software from prototype through production
- Experience working with financial, legal, or other complex datasets
- Familiarity with prompt design, context management, model evaluation, and techniques for improving LLM reliability
- Experience working across a variety of technical projects, ideally for multiple companies or clients
- Comfortable working independently and figuring things out without a detailed set of requirements
- Local to New York City and excited about the opportunity to have regular in-person working sessions
What the job involves
- Legalist is looking for an AI Native Engineer to join our team and work directly with our Co-founder to build AI-powered products and workflows. This is a hands-on, execution-focused role for someone who has a track record of building across a variety of projects and is already using AI as a core part of how they develop software
- Design and build new AI products, tools, and features
- Build applications using LLMs and foundation model APIs
- Develop AI agents and multi-step workflows that connect models with internal and external systems
- Build integrations with third-party APIs, internal data sources, and existing software
- Design and implement RAG pipelines, including retrieval, embeddings, vector search, and context management
- Build backend services and APIs to support AI applications
- Prototype new ideas quickly, thoroughly test them, and turn successful prototypes into production-ready tools
- Evaluate models and approaches based on accuracy, latency, cost, and reliability
- Build evaluations and testing processes to measure and improve model outputs
- Stay current on new models, developer tools, frameworks, and AI capabilities
Our take
Legalist was founded to empower small and medium-sized businesses to access justice usually available only to the largest companies. It does this by investing in meritorious lawsuits - leveraging legal knowledge, tech and data to do so.
The company uses data from millions of court records to power its investment, vetting meritorious legal cases for investment based on the likelihood of winning. This takes into account factors such as the judge, lawyers, court type, and other details. Through this approach, the firm can generate returns for its clients while also providing capital to the lawyers and plaintiffs who need it most.
The company now manages over $1.5B in technology-enabled alternative investments. Due to a surge in demand, the company expects to continue accelerating its year-on-year growth - enabling it to further carve out a strong presence in the alternative assets market.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-17% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Sep 2019
$100m
EARLY VC
Dec 2016
$0.2m
SEED
Total funding: $100.2m
Company HQ
Yerba Buena, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Eva Shang
(Co-Founder & General Partner)After dropping out of Harvard, Eva founded Legalist at the age of 20, leading the startup through Y Combinator's S16 accelerator program. She has served as CEO since 2016.
Christian Haigh
(Co-Founder)Christian is currently the CEO at Compound. Previously, he was Curator at TEDxHarvard College.
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