Senior AI Software Engineer

Stikeman Elliott is building its own agentic AI platform, with production agents working alongside lawyers on the firm's matters. Built on the Claude Agent SDK and integrated with the firm's systems of record through MCP tool servers, the platform is already in daily use and continues to expand. This is the senior engineering role responsible for advancing its development.

You will design, build and deploy the firm's AI applications end to end, including production agentic systems, MCP servers that connect to document, email, matter, billing and CRM systems, and reusable plugins and skills that standardize legal and business workflows.

This is a hands‑on senior engineering role that spans application architecture, software development and production delivery. You will also provide technical leadership to a small team, with direct access to the firm's CIO and Enterprise Architect.

What you can expect: The opportunity to build greenfield systems using modern tools and technologies, work with a user base of lawyers who actively adopt solutions that deliver value, and have the autonomy to shape how the platform is designed and built.

• Own application architecture, including service decomposition, data persistence, state and concurrency models, failure handling, and component interfaces.
• Build agent‑facing capabilities as portable tool servers.

• Build production applications using the Claude Agent SDK, including sub‑agent delegation, skills, plugins, memory, scheduled and headless execution, and context engineering.
• Develop and maintain MCP servers and tool sets, including structured outputs, HTTP transport, and OAuth.
• Extend reusable plugins and skills that standardize the firm's legal and business workflows.
• Design human‑in‑the‑loop controls for high‑risk agentic actions.

• Rapidly translate requirements into working MVPs for user feedback and iteration.
• Take prototypes through to production, ensuring reliability, scalability, observability, documentation, and security.
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for AI applications.

• Build integrations with the firm's core systems, including document and email management, practice and matter management, time and billing, CRM, enterprise data platforms, and Microsoft Graph.
• Implement secure identity and access patterns, including OBO flows and managed identities, to appropriately constrain agent access.
• Address complex integration requirements, including authentication, session persistence, certificate trust, pagination, rate limits, and idempotency.
• Establish engineering standards across AI repositories, including repository structure, branching, releases, code review, CI gates, environment promotion, and secrets management.
• Lead code reviews for AI applications and plugin contributions, while mentoring developers on engineering practices.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and strengthen the software supply chain in collaboration with Information Security through automated testing, code quality controls, security scanning, dependency management, and secure application credentials.

• Minimum of five years of experience designing and delivering production software, including at least one year working directly with LLM-powered or agentic applications in production.
• Demonstrated end‑to‑end ownership of production applications, from architecture and development through deployment and ongoing support.
• Proven ability to take solutions from prototype to production and make sound decisions about technical viability.
• Experience working as a senior technical contributor in a small, hands‑on development environment.
• Experience mentoring…