Staff Python Engineer

About Lawhive

Our mission is to make the law accessible to everyone. The legal industry is built on technology and processes that haven’t been updated in hundreds of years - that's why we've reinvented the entire model from the ground up with our own bespoke AI operating system at the core. Lawhive is a regulated law firm with an AI-native platform built to amplify expertise and revolutionise the way people practice law, leading to exceptional outcomes for clients and lawyers. Lawhive Labs is how we bring this vision to life. It's our frontier lab that combines top engineering, design, AI and legal talent from around the world, joining forces to build the future of law. We’re backed by top-tier investors, including Google Ventures, Balderton Capital and TQ Ventures, and in early 2026, we secured $60M Series B funding round to facilitate international expansion and to grow our team. We’re headquartered in London and in 2025 successfully launched in the US…and we’re just getting started.

Engineering at Lawhive

We are a team of 40 engineers and researchers, responsible for architecting, building and running Lawhive’s platform, relied on by hundreds of legal professionals every day in the UK, US, and beyond. There are lots of problems we have yet to solve, and plenty we’re not aware of yet! In the next 12 months, we’re focused on:

• Pushing the envelope on the user experience of lawyers’ AI interactions. We’re not satisfied with “chat” as a default and are inventing a new paradigm for human/machine interaction.
• Building modularity and country independence into the heart of our platform. We’ve recently expanded to the US and are building the world’s first global consumer law firm.
• Full stack AI-native legal services: we’re not only building software, we’re an AI-native law firm.

The Role

We’re looking for a Staff Python Engineer to join our AI Engineering & Infrastructure team to bring our latest AI-driven features and services into production. Deploying them at scale, improving infrastructure, and ensuring robustness in production. You’ll work closely with AI researchers, software engineers, and product teams to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and real-world applications.

Responsibilities

• Developing production-ready APIs and services that expose AI functionality to internal and external applications.
• Improving reliability & monitoring for AI-driven applications in production.
• Scaling AI systems to handle real-world legal use cases (e.g., legal document analysis, case predictions, automated legal advice).
• Collaborating with AI engineers to ensure smooth deployment of AI workflows and models into production.
• Working with event‑driven architectures and async workflows to process large‑scale AI workloads efficiently.
• Ensuring security & compliance in AI‑driven legal services.

Requirements

• Strong Python experience in building scalable backend systems.
• Familiarity with API design & distributed systems architecture.
• Experience working with event‑driven architectures (e.g. Kafka, Pub/Sub, AWS Step Functions, etc.).
• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP etc).
• Understanding of best practices in observability, monitoring, and debugging.

Nice to Have

• LLM Observability & Evaluation – familiarity with tools such as Langfuse for monitoring model generations, managing prompts, and measuring quality in production.
• Comfortable optimising performance & scaling distributed AI workloads and ML Ops experience.
• Full‑stack TypeScript experience.
• Hands‑on work with vector databases, hybrid retrieval methods, and evaluation of retrieval quality.
• Agentic & Orchestrated Systems – exposure to multi‑step reasoning, agent frameworks, or orchestration tools (e.g. LangChain, AutoGen, Inngest, Temporal) where LLMs call tools, plan tasks, or coordinate workflows.
• Experience working in collaboration with researchers so that new models, pipelines, or research outputs can be integrated and evolved iteratively.
• Prior Experience in Legal Tech - understanding of the legal industry and experience working with legal technology solutions.

UK Benefits

• Meaningful early‑stage equity at one of Europe’s fastest growing startups.
• 33 days’ annual leave (25 + bank holidays) plus your birthday off.
• Work from anywhere for a month.
• Pension contribution via Nest.
• Top‑spec equipment - MacBook/Windows.
• Regular team building activities and socials!

Diversity at Lawhive

At Lawhive, we know that diversity of thought is critical to delivering outlier outcomes. As such, we’re always working hard to ensure we build a diverse, inclusive team, and as we scale, we’ll only ever increase the focus we apply to this.