Research Engineer

  • Indefinido
  • Tiempo parcial
  • Mixto (Reino Unido)

About vLex

vLex is a global provider of legal intelligence and research solutions, offering access to one of the world's largest collections of legal information, including case law, legislation, regulations, and secondary sources. Leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics, vLex empowers law firms, corporations, academic institutions, and government agencies with smarter, faster, and more comprehensive legal research tools.

Clio, the world’s leading provider of legal technology, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire vLex. This transaction is a major milestone in Clio’s platform evolution and a turning point for the future of legal work. It combines Clio’s legal operating system - trusted by more than 200,000 legal professionals - with vLex’s cutting-edge legal intelligence platform, which includes Vincent, its groundbreaking AI, built on the industry’s most comprehensive global legal database. Together, these platforms establish a new category of intelligent legal technology at the intersection of the business and practice of law, empowering legal professionals to seamlessly manage, research, and execute legal work within a unified system.

Learn more
here.


Position Overview

As a Research Engineer, you will play a key role in advancing the vLex product portfolio by contributing to applied research projects that integrate cutting-edge AI—particularly large language models (LLMs)—into real-world legal workflows. You will work closely with product engineers and domain experts in a fast-paced environment that involves sophisticated technical challenges to deliver innovative solutions that push the boundaries of legal technology.



Illustrative projects:

  • Foundations of retrieval at scale: Re-think how we search over vast, heterogeneous legal corpora. Exploring new approaches to chunking, query augmentation, hybrid sparse/dense embeddings, contextual embeddings, quantisation, to push the boundaries of recall,speed, and efficiency.

  • Learning to rank with legal signal: Experiment with re-ranking strategies for search results that incorporate legal-specific signals that go beyond keyword matches and semantic similarities, to surface the most authoritative and relevant results first.

  • Agentic infrastructure for legal workflows: Develop the foundations of agents that can decompose complex legal tasks, plan across multiple tools, and execute with traceability and guardrails. These are building blocks that underpin future end-to-end automated workflows.

  • Evaluation frameworks for retrieval and agents: Design and run experiments that help us measure system performance against the needs of legal professionals: offline testbeds, human-in-the-loop evaluations, implicit feedback pipelines, and alignment between lab metrics and customer satisfaction.

  • Grounding and validation of model responses: Create mechanisms that ensure model responses are trustworthy by anchoring them in trusted legal sources, with clear traceability to supporting evidence, and methods for validating cited content and surfacing uncertainty when the model lacks sufficient grounding.

Key Responsibilities

As a Research Engineer, you will:

  • Support in complex research projects focused on LLMs, advanced information retrieval, and novel AI applications in the legal domain, working independently with minimal supervision.

  • Contribute to the design and implement sophisticated prototypes that demonstrate the feasibility and business value of cutting-edge research ideas, ensuring they meet production-quality standards.

  • Assist in the transition of research innovations from prototype to production, collaborating closely with product and engineering teams to ensure successful integration and scalability.

  • Contribute to strategic research planning by identifying high-impact research opportunities and helping prioritize initiatives based on business value and technical feasibility.

  • Stay at the forefront of AI research, particularly in NLP, LLMs, and legal AI, actively incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into your work and sharing insights with the team.

  • Participate in the team technical discussions and code reviews, ensuring high standards of research quality and implementation across the team.

  • Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders including product managers, legal engineers, and business leaders to align research efforts with strategic objectives.

  • Document and communicate research findings through internal presentations, technical documentation, and potentially external publications or conference presentations.

  • Contribute to the development of research infrastructure and best practices that enhance the team's overall efficiency and impact.

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

  • Masters degree or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence or a related field.

  • 1+ years of experience in applied AI research or engineering

  • At least one of the following experiences:

    • Information retrieval systems

    • LLM fine-tuning and evaluation

    • LLM hosting and inference optimization

    • LLM workflow automation using prompt engineering, prompt chaining techniques, and agent orchestration frameworks.

  • Strong track record of independently delivering complex technical projects from concept to implementation.

  • Hands-on experience in working closely with product engineering in production applications

  • Proficiency in data manipulation, cleaning, and pre-processing for complex unstructured data sets

  • A proven ability to quickly learn new technologies and adapt to a dynamic, fast-paced environment with distributed teams and customers

  • A strong understanding of modern AI tools and approaches.

  • Clear communication skills and the ability to build trust with both internal teams and external customers

  • A strong desire to continuously learn, challenge yourself, and refine your craft

  • A deep interest in how technology transforms the legal industry is highly valuable.



What We Offer

At vLex, we care about your well-being. Our benefits package is designed to support your health and help you maintain a fulfilling balance between your professional and personal life.

  • Dynamic and collaborative work environment

  • Flexible working arrangements

  • Commitment to mental health and overall well-being

  • Career development and learning opportunities

  • Inclusive and multicultural teams

  • Creativity-driven culture and innovative projects

  • Team-building activities and community events

  • Access to state-of-the-art legal technology

  • International work environment with exposure to global markets.