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