AI Engineer

AI Engineer

Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP is a multidisciplinary, integrated national professional services firm known for quality and an extraordinary commitment to clients. The Firm's groundbreaking approach—bringing together legal services, advocacy and business strategy—differentiates Manatt from its competitors and positions the Firm to provide a distinct and compelling value proposition.

The AI Engineer is responsible for developing the custom AI capabilities that extend value across Manatt beyond what commercial tools provide out of the box. Where the AI Solutions Analysts administer and deploy the firm's existing AI platforms, the AI Engineer builds what does not yet exist — designing integrations, APIs, and purpose-built AI applications that bring AI-driven productivity to attorneys and professionals throughout the firm.

This individual works at the intersection of software engineering and applied AI, translating complex legal and operational requirements into scalable, production-grade solutions. The AI Engineer works closely with the AI & Solutions Architect on design standards and with the AI Solutions Analysts on use case identification, ensuring that custom-built capabilities can be handed off for ongoing administration and broad deployment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and develop custom AI applications, integrations, and workflow automations that address high-priority use cases identified by the AI Solutions Analysts, AI & Solutions Architect, and other firm leadership needs.
• Build and maintain integrations between the firm's AI platforms, data systems, and business applications using APIs, SDKs, and custom middleware — ensuring reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Develop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines that connect firm knowledge — matters, precedents, templates, policies — to AI models in a governed and permissioned manner.
• Build AI agents and multi-step automated workflows designed for handoff to the AI Solutions Analysts for ongoing administration and firmwide deployment.

Architecture Alignment & Engineering Standards

• Collaborate with the AI & Solutions Architect to ensure all custom development adheres to firm architectural standards, security requirements, coding practices, and deployment pipelines.
• Maintain production code, manage version control, and ensure all deployed AI solutions are monitored, documented, and supportable by the broader AI team.
• Evaluate and prototype emerging AI frameworks and tools, providing structured recommendations to the Architect and Program Lead on applicability to the firm's use case roadmap.
• Contribute to the definition and continuous improvement of engineering standards, testing practices, and deployment processes for AI systems at the firm.

Use Case Delivery & Stakeholder Collaboration

• Work cross-functionally with IT, Legal Operations, and Consulting stakeholders to gather requirements, validate solutions, and ensure that built capabilities solve real workflow problems at scale.
• Translate complex technical capabilities into accessible workflow solutions that can be leveraged by attorneys and professionals who are not AI power users.
• Partner with AI Solutions Analysts to identify workflow gaps that exceed the configuration capabilities of existing tools and warrant custom engineering effort.
• Participate in the documentation of use cases, solution patterns, and technical specifications, contributing to the firm's growing AI knowledge base.

Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• Stay current on developments in LLM capabilities, AI agent frameworks, and enterprise AI engineering, translating relevant advances into actionable prototypes and proposals.
• Identify and recommend opportunities to productize successful one-off AI solutions into reusable components that can be deployed across multiple practice groups.
• Participate in vendor evaluations, contributing hands-on technical assessments of AI tools under consideration by the firm.

Required Skills & Expertise:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 4–7 years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years focused on AI/ML or LLM application…