AI Native Engineer

Intro description:

Legalist is a tech-enabled alternative asset manager that uses proprietary data-driven origination to invest in uncorrelated legal and government-payment assets. Founded out of Y Combinator in 2016, Legalist manages over $1.7 billion for endowments, foundations, and family offices.

Summary 

Legalist is looking for an AI Native Engineer to join our team and work directly with our Co-founder to build AI-powered products and workflows. This is a hands-on, execution-focused role for someone who has a track record of building across a variety of projects and is already using AI as a core part of how they develop software. Our ideal candidate operates in a fast-paced environment and can take a business problem or idea, figure out the technical approach, build a solution, and iterate quickly. 

Responsibilities

• Design and build new AI products, tools, and features


• Build applications using LLMs and foundation model APIs


• Develop AI agents and multi-step workflows that connect models with internal and external systems


• Build integrations with third-party APIs, internal data sources, and existing software


• Design and implement RAG pipelines, including retrieval, embeddings, vector search, and context management


• Build backend services and APIs to support AI applications


• Prototype new ideas quickly, thoroughly test them, and turn successful prototypes into production-ready tools


• Evaluate models and approaches based on accuracy, latency, cost, and reliability


• Build evaluations and testing processes to measure and improve model outputs


• Stay current on new models, developer tools, frameworks, and AI capabilities

Qualifications 

• 3+ years of professional software development experience 


• Hands-on experience building applications with LLM APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar 


• Experience building AI agents, tool-calling workflows, or other agentic systems


• Strong understanding of APIs, backend development, databases, and cloud infrastructure


• Experience taking software from prototype through production


• Experience working with financial, legal, or other complex datasets


• Familiarity with prompt design, context management, model evaluation, and techniques for improving LLM reliability


• Experience working across a variety of technical projects, ideally for multiple companies or clients


• Comfortable working independently and figuring things out without a detailed set of requirements


• Local to New York City and excited about the opportunity to have regular in-person working sessions