Senior Software Development Engineer

Gibson Dunn is a leading global law firm, advising clients on significant transactions and disputes. Our exceptional teams craft and deploy creative legal strategies that are meticulously tailored to every matter, however complex or high-stakes. The firm’s work is distinguished by a unique combination of precision and vision.

Based in New York City or Washington, D.C., the Senior Software Development Engineer designs, architects, builds, and leads the delivery of enterprise applications and shared platform capabilities, serving as a technical leader responsible for driving engineering excellence, scalable architecture, and successful delivery of complex software initiatives. This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys building user-centric software solutions and integrating cutting-edge capabilities into scalable enterprise applications.

The role works in close partnership with the firm’s AI Platform Engineering team to design and build agentic workflows – systems that plan, invoke tools, and carry out multi-step work on behalf of attorneys and business professionals.

• CI/CD, Source Control & Test Automation:
  Git, JFrog Artifactory; automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, release management, and observability tooling
• Infrastructure as Code:
  Terraform, Bicep
• AI Inference & Application Infrastructure:
  The firm’s proprietary LLMs and model gateway services, retrieval and hybrid search, vector databases, chat interfaces, agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., Lang Graph, Semantic Kernel), and Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• AI Evaluation & Quality: LLM evaluation tooling, eval harnesses, and regression suites for non-deterministic systems
• Enterprise Systems & Integration:
  Document management, knowledge repositories, search services, and firm business applications

• Build user-facing applications, APIs, and services that enable attorneys and business professionals to leverage capabilities securely and effectively.
• Develop solutions that integrate generated insights into existing legal, business, and knowledge management workflows.
• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade software applications that consume and interact with Gibson Dunn’s proprietary LLMs, services, and intelligent agent frameworks.

• Define the long-term technical strategy and lead the architecture for enterprise applications and shared platforms.
• Drive technical direction across multiple engineering teams and strategic initiatives.
• Make architectural decisions balancing scalability, maintainability, security, and performance.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend adoption where appropriate.
• Translate legal and business workflows into agent-assisted experiences, exercising judgment about where an agent adds real value and where deterministic software remains the better answer.

• Design and build agentic workflows that plan, call tools, and execute multi-step legal and business tasks, including the tool and Model Context Protocol (MCP) interfaces that expose firm systems to agents under correctly scoped permissions.
• Build the orchestration around agent runs, including state management, retries, checkpointing, and safe recovery for long-running and asynchronous work.
• Design human-in-the-loop review, approval, and override points so attorneys retain control over consequential actions and agent output remains verifiable.
• Define evaluations and regression tests for agent behavior, instrument runs end to end (traces, tool calls, tokens, latency, cost), and tune for quality and unit economics alongside AI Platform Engineering.
• Develop modern web applications and services using contemporary…