Senior NLP Research Engineer, Clio
CA$154.7-209.3k
2-5 days a week in office
Legal practice management software
Job no longer available
Legal practice management software
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
CA$154.7-209.3k
2-5 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To transform the legal experience for all.
Role
Who you are
- This role is available to candidates local to our Toronto hub, with the expectation of being in office minimum twice per week on our Anchor Days
- Masters degree or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field
- Industry experience in applied AI research or engineering
- At least one of the following experiences:
- Information retrieval systems
- LLM fine-tuning and evaluation
- LLM hosting and inference optimization
- LLM workflow automation using prompt engineering, prompt chaining techniques, and agent orchestration frameworks
- Track record of independently delivering complex technical projects from ideation to implementation
- Hands-on experience in working closely with product engineering in production applications
- Proficiency in data manipulation, cleaning, and pre-processing for complex unstructured data sets
- A proven ability to quickly learn new technologies and adapt to a fast-paced environment with distributed teams and customers
- A strong understanding of modern AI tools and approaches
- Clear communication skills and the ability to build trust with both internal teams and external customers
- A desire to continuously learn, challenge yourself, and refine your craft
- A deep interest in how technology transforms the legal industry is highly valuable
- We believe that different perspectives, skills, backgrounds, and experiences result in higher-performing teams and better innovation. We are committed to equal employment and we encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply
What the job involves
- As a Senior NLP Research Engineer, you will play a key role in developing and advancing Vincent, vLex’s groundbreaking AI, by contributing to applied research experiments that integrate cutting-edge AI - particularly large language models (LLMs) - into real-world legal workflows
- You will work closely with software engineers and domain experts on sophisticated technical challenges to deliver innovative solutions that push the boundaries of legal technology
- Foundations of retrieval at scale: Re-think how we search over vast, heterogeneous legal corpora. Exploring new approaches to chunking, query augmentation, hybrid sparse/dense embeddings, contextual embeddings, quantisation, to push the boundaries of recall, speed, and efficiency
- Learning to rank with legal signals: Experiment with re-ranking strategies for search results that incorporate legal-specific signals that go beyond keyword matches and semantic similarities, to surface the most authoritative and relevant results first
- Agentic infrastructure for legal workflows: Develop the foundations of agents that can decompose complex legal tasks, plan across multiple tools, and execute with traceability and guardrails. These are building blocks that underpin future end-to-end automated workflows
- Evaluation frameworks for retrieval and agents: Design and run experiments that help us measure system performance against the needs of legal professionals: offline testbeds, human-in-the-loop evaluations, implicit feedback pipelines, and alignment between lab metrics and customer satisfaction
- Grounding and validation of model responses: Create mechanisms that ensure model responses are trustworthy by anchoring them in trusted legal sources, with clear traceability to supporting evidence, and methods for validating cited content and surfacing uncertainty when the model lacks sufficient grounding
- Leading complex research projects focused on LLMs, advanced information retrieval, and novel AI applications in the legal domain, working independently with minimal supervision
- Designing and implementing sophisticated prototypes that demonstrate the feasibility and business value of cutting-edge research ideas, ensuring they meet production-quality standards
- Driving the transition of research innovations from prototype to production, collaborating closely with product and engineering teams to ensure successful integration and scalability
- Contributing to strategic research planning by identifying high-impact research opportunities and helping prioritize initiatives based on business value and technical feasibility
- Staying at the forefront of AI research, particularly in NLP, LLMs, and legal AI, actively incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into your work and sharing insights with the team
- Lead technical discussions and code reviews, ensuring high standards of research quality and implementation across the team
- Collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders including product managers, legal engineers, and business leaders to align research efforts with strategic objectives
- Documenting and communicating research findings through internal presentations, technical documentation, and potentially external publications or conference presentations
- Contributing to the development of research infrastructure and best practices that enhance the team's overall efficiency and impact
- This is a new role
Our take
Modern law firms increasingly manage their work digitally but the lack of a specialized remote solution means that workflows have become fragmented. This leads to legal practice managers having to juggle multiple software solutions across various devices.
Clio provides a legal practice management platform designed for law firms, allowing users to manage billing for legal aid cases, access and manage documents and store files across multiple devices. Whilst other startups are operating in this niche, Clio has uniquely focussed on synchronisation across remote devices and on a wide range of integrations, allowing the user to access information from other industry standard software such as Xero and Klyant from within a single interface.
Clio has raised significant funding and benefited from the COVID-era shift toward cloud technologies. More recently, the company has experienced rapid growth following the integration of AI into its platform in 2023. Alongside this, it surpassed $200M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in mid-2024 and has since grown to an impressive $500M ARR. The company was valued at $5B following a $500M funding round in 2025, with the investment supporting further AI development and platform expansion.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Company benefits
- Specialized learning and development programs and access to an in-house performance coach
- Equitable compensation for your contributions, regardless of gender, race, or any other identifying factor
- Access to pay transparency on all of our global roles
- Company equity for applicable employees
- RRSP-matching in Canada, 401k in the US, and pension plans in Ireland
- Hybrid model – striking the right balance between the benefits of in person connectivity that in office brings, and the flexibility of remote
- Flexible paid time off (4-week minimum with opportunities for personalization based on individual needs and achievements)
- Parental leave options for birthing and non-birthing parents
- A $500 contribution to your child’s RESP
- Various health, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family, including an Employee and Family Assistance Program
- Virtual and In-person Wellness Programs to support mental and physical health
- Paid time for volunteering through our Clio Gives program
- $2000 annual counseling benefit for CAD Clions
Company HQ
Burnaby, BC
Leadership
Jack Newton
(Founder & CEO)Alongside serving as Clio's CEO since founding the company in 2008, Jack is an Advisor at Athennian, dealcloser, and Logikcull. Previously, they were a Board Member at ROSS Intelligence and a Director of Product Development at Chenomx.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 105 more jobs at Clio