Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Our Story:

Litera, headquartered in Chicago, IL, is a fast-growing software company and one of the leading legal technology suppliers in the world. Serving more than 90% of the world's largest law firms, our software is used by hundreds of thousands of lawyers every day. As a company recognized as one of the best places to work, we believe professional development, rewards programs, open communication, and transparent leadership all contribute to a unique and open work environment. Our employees are driven, energetic, passionate, and have the ability to make a direct impact on the future of the company.

The Opportunity:

We are hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join a cross-functional team of high performing engineers and designers responsible for building and enhancing our Kira product.

For 10+ years, Kira has been using machine learning to enlighten the world’s enterprises by enabling them to truly know what’s in their contracts and documents. We’re bold in our decision making, clear on our mission and – most importantly – passionate about pairing the power of human know-how with a powerful product.

You will drive the research and design of enhancements to existing machine learning models, creation of new machine learning models and utilization of  3rd party machine learning models in order to solve important Kira customer problems. You will also  help guide the deployment of these systems and tools into production. You will also work collaboratively with our Product, Legal Knowledge Engineering (LKE), and Engineering teams to drive the success of our ML and AI initiatives.

A Day in the Life:

• Understand business objectives and develop models that help to achieve them, while understanding and adhering to applicable requirements and constraints
• Keep up with new developments and trends in ML and AI such as large language models and assessing what is relevant and/or beneficial for our product roadmap
• Drive the research and design of new and existing machine learning models and systems as well as utilizing 3rd party machine learning and large language models.
• Develop production ready and high-performance backend code that brings machine learning capabilities into production
• Share your expertise to ensure the next incarnation of our system is designed to be highly performant, stable, and robust
• Collaborate closely with peers to help us move incrementally closer to the product vision

Role Progression:

Within 1 month, you will:

• Complete our onboarding process
• Meet your team, associated leads and learn the nuts and bolts of our business and where we’re going
• Familiarize yourself with our technology and existing ML stack

Within 3 months, you will:

• Work closely with your team on near-term ML needs and priorities
• Anticipate and plan research for our future ML and AI initiatives, such as identifying applicable uses of large language models (LLM) for use in Kira
• Begin to improve and develop the building and maintenance of ML libraries that encapsulate new functionality for Kira

Within 6 months, you will:

• Feel ownership and accountability for the ML research and development that you and your team will own
• Start to become the subject matter expert for how the teams at Kira can use the code your team delivers, helping to determine where bottlenecks may arise, and finding possible mitigations
• Work across scrum teams for platform level enhancements and changes

About You:

• PhD or Master’s degree in computer science or computer engineering with a research focus on machine learning
• Demonstrated experience applying machine learning research to novel problems and data sets
• Demonstrated expertise in one or more of: natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding and generation, image recognition, deep learning, AI/ML safety and privacy
• Experience with Golang, Rust, or Java and experience with Python and associated machine learning libraries
• Experience with Conditional Random Field (CRF) models and supervised learning methodologies
• Knowledge of large language models (LLM) and hands-on experience with Azure, AWS, and OpenAI services is considered an asset
• Excellent written, verbal, and video-based communication skills (we’re a distributed team)
• Team player mentality who enjoys collaborating with cross-functional peers
• A strong desire to keep learning new things

Why Litera?

We strive to stay current with all employment trends and prioritize flexibility, employee well-being, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Most of our employees are fully remote, and we do not have a return-to-office plan as we are more successful working remotely. Our generous PTO and ten flexible holidays promote work-life balance. And all our employees are encouraged to access personal development courses and tools in our internal learning management system.
 
Litera is an equal opportunity employer, and proud to be committed to diversity and inclusiveness. We will consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, nationality, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or age.