Staff AI Engineer

Location: London

Employment Type: Full time

Location Type: Hybrid

Department: Engineering

We’re on a mission to make real estate transactions smarter, faster, and friction‑free. Real estate is the world’s largest asset class, yet the legal processes and tools behind it remain slow, manual, and underinvested. Lawyers must review dense documents line by line and piece together information across silos, all while clients demand faster, more transparent due diligence. That is where we come in. Orbital Copilot is the AI assistant built exclusively for commercial real estate law. Developed with former practicing real estate lawyers, it accelerates complex due diligence by up to 70% while delivering legal‑grade precision.

We’ve just raised a $60m Series B to accelerate our UK/US expansion. We’re trusted by leading firms like Goodwin and BCLP to remove the busywork so legal teams can focus on what they do best: applying sharp legal judgement, delivering standout client service, and getting deals over the line faster.

Working at Orbital means joining a team that’s reimagining how real estate transactions get done – moving fast, working collaboratively, and giving people ownership to make a real impact from day one.

Our Vision

We’re building the AI that runs real estate transactions end‑to‑end. Today, property deals depend on overworked lawyers buried in paperwork and reports – a system that is slow, expensive, and stuck in the last century. We’re replacing it with autonomous AI that handles the work from instruction to completion, so deals move at the speed of decisions, not documents.

Our Mission

Our mission is to help any professional or individual involved in a property transaction to properly understand what they are getting into, from the outset, before incurring legal fees.

Our Values

• We are Bold & Ambitious (changing an entire industry is hard!)
• We give Power to our People (we give exceptional people autonomy to succeed)
• We Question or Commit (we welcome debate but love reaching quick decisions)
• … and we Eat that Frog! (we take on the hardest thing first)

Role Overview

We are seeking an exceptional Senior/Staff AI Engineer to join us at a defining moment for the company and for AI itself. You’ll be a senior technical leader on Orbital Copilot – our agentic AI system reshaping how commercial real‑estate transactions get done, and a force‑multiplier on the rest of the AI org. This is not a role for someone looking to transition into AI. We’re looking for an engineer who has lived and breathed AI/ML for years, who has built and scaled AI or agentic products from zero to multi‑million ARR, and who has the scars and intuitions to prove it.

You’ve shipped systems where model behaviour, evaluation rigour, and product instincts had to come together for the business to work – and you’ve done it in production with real users, real money, and real consequences. We’re looking for someone who has a clear, considered mental model of where this technology is heading, what genuinely matters, and what’s noise. You’re opinionated about agent design, evals, model selection, and the right level of abstraction – because you’ve earned those opinions the hard way.

At Orbital, we leverage the most intelligent, bleeding‑edge models from leading AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and we’re building one of the most ambitious agentic systems in legal AI. You’ll own technical direction on hard problems – multi‑agent orchestration, long‑horizon reasoning, retrieval and document understanding at scale, and the evaluation infrastructure that lets us move fast without breaking trust. You’ll set the bar for the wider AI engineering team, mentor strong engineers, and partner closely with the VP of AI, AI product managers, real estate legal domain experts, and software engineers to take Orbital Copilot to the next order of magnitude.

What You’ll Get a Chance to Do

• Set technical direction for Orbital Copilot’s agentic architecture and the AI systems underpinning our next‑generation products.
• Design, build, and scale complex AI features end‑to‑end – from research spike to production system serving high‑stakes legal workflows.
• Drive the hardest AI problems we face: multi‑agent systems, long‑context reasoning, retrieval‑augmented generation, document‑understanding pipelines, and frontier model integration.
• Build the evaluation, monitoring, and reliability infrastructure that makes shipping AI in regulated, high‑trust environments possible.
• Raise the bar on the AI engineering team – through code review, architecture review, mentorship, and the standards you set in your own work.
• Partner with the VP of AI, AI PMs, and legal domain experts to translate a strong product worldview into systems that move customer and business metrics.
• Make the calls on model choice, abstractions, and trade‑offs that compound across the company’s roadmap.

Qualifications

• You have a deep AI/ML background with several years working hands‑on with modern AI systems – not adjacent to them.
• You have built and scaled an AI or agentic product from early stages to multi‑million ARR, and can speak concretely to the technical and product decisions that got it there.
• You have a track record of excellence – a clear, demonstrable bar reached in your work, research, or both. We want to see evidence you’ve operated at the very top of your field.
• You have a well‑formed thesis on where the frontier is going and what it means for product, and you bring that perspective to every decision.
• You are AGI‑pilled with real conviction and the technical chops to back it up in production.
• You’ve owned production AI systems through deployment, evaluation, monitoring, and continuous improvement and know what good looks like.
• You raise the bar for the engineers around you and have a track record of doing so.
• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills in English, and can make sharp, opinionated technical arguments land with both engineers and non‑engineers.

Nice to Have

• Deep, hands‑on experience with frontier LLMs (OpenAI’s GPT‑5, Anthropic’s Claude models, Google’s Gemini) and agentic frameworks.
• Experience designing and operating multi‑agent systems or complex agentic architectures in production.
• A strong evaluation and experimentation discipline – you’ve built eval harnesses, offline/online evaluation pipelines, and you treat evals as a first‑class part of the product.
• Experience building high‑performance, distributed systems at scale.
• Proven expertise in building highly secure, fault‑tolerant APIs.
• Strong understanding of modern dev practices like 12‑Factor, CI/CD, and observability tools such as Datadog or Prometheus.
• Exposure to GraphQL APIs and WebSockets for real‑time interactions.
• Any frontend experience.

Benefits

• Competitive starting salary
• Matched pension contributions and equity options in a fast‑growing start‑up
• Flexible working hours and location
• 25 days paid holiday (plus bank holidays)
• Professional equipment and personal development budget along with training opportunities to learn and develop your skills
• Free lunch on Wednesdays and Deliveroo budget for late nights
• Cycle‑to‑work scheme

Security

Security is everyone’s responsibility at Orbital. We ask all team members to follow our security policies, complete regular awareness training, and handle sensitive data with care in line with ISO 27001 standards. Spot something unusual? Reporting risks or incidents quickly helps us maintain the strong culture of security and compliance we all depend on.

We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We especially welcome applications from people who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. Even if you don’t meet every single requirement, or if the right role isn’t listed yet, we’d still love to hear from you.

Pay Range

This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on several factors, which may include job‑related knowledge, skills, experience, and business requirements.