Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

About the Role

This role sits within the applied science function. You will own the design, development, and production deployment of document understanding systems that power Westlaw, Practical Law, and CoCounsel. The problems are real, the scale is large, and the expectation is shipped, reliable, measurable impact.

You will work across semantic chunking, document enrichment, knowledge graph construction, and synthetic data generation for complex legal, tax, and accounting content. Multiple product teams depend on what this function delivers.

You hold a PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field, with 8+ years of post-degree industry experience taking NLP and document understanding systems from development to production  have hands-on depth across the full applied arc — model development, distillation, evaluation, and deployment. You publish, you mentor, and you measure success by what ships and performs in production.

• Design and deploy semantic chunking models for lengthy, non-uniformly structured legal documents with adjustable granularity across use cases
• Build document enrichment systems using legal and customer-defined taxonomies
• Develop LLM-based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link citations, entities, and legal concepts across diverse legal content
• Lead knowledge distillation efforts to compress large models into latency-constrained, production-ready SLMs
• Design evaluation frameworks — component-level and end-to-end — using expert annotation and synthetic data
• Own technical decisions on architecture, chunking strategy, classification approach, and knowledge extraction methods
• Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines
• Provide technical input to senior leadership on AI strategy and roadmap
• Mentor applied scientists and ML practitioners on the team

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field – required
• 8+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping document understanding, information extraction, or knowledge graph systems into production — not research-only
• Publications at ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent
• Production Python and experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and Deep Speed

• Document layout analysis and semantic chunking beyond fixed-size or paragraph-based methods
• Hierarchical, multi-label document classification with domain-specific and customer-defined schemas
• Entity recognition and linking, relation extraction, citation parsing, and knowledge graph construction from unstructured text
• LLM-based information extraction, few-shot and multi-task learning, and post-training
• Knowledge distillation, model compression, and SLM deployment under latency constraints
• Synthetic data generation and annotation workflow design
• End-to-end evaluation framework design for document understanding

• Legal document understanding, legal IE, or legal AI experience
• Complex document structures: nested hierarchies, cross-references, non-uniform formatting
• Retrieval or QA systems over large document collections
• RAG and agentic workflows in enterprise settings
• Knowledge graph frameworks for legal or enterprise applications
• AzureML or AWS Sage Maker

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What s in it For You?

• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: Flex My Way is a set of supportive workplace policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, empowering employees to achieve a better work-life balance.
• Career Development and Growth: Our Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.
• Industry Competitive Benefits: Comprehensive benefit plans including flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
• Culture: Globally recognized for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more. We live by our…