Applied Research Engineer

📋 Description

• • The Applied Research Engineer role at Lawhive sits at the intersection of cutting‑edge AI research and practical legal technology, directly supporting the company’s mission to make the law accessible to everyone. By developing LLM‑based AI assistants, document automation tools, and case workflow optimisations, the role helps transform a traditionally stagnant industry into an AI‑native ecosystem that delivers better outcomes for clients and lawyers alike.
• • Day‑to‑day responsibilities include conducting applied research on LLM‑based reasoning and multi‑agent systems, building prototypes and experimental models for novel AI‑driven legal solutions, designing and implementing retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) pipelines using embeddings, vector databases, and structured retrieval, optimising LLM inference and fine‑tuning via LoRA, PEFT, prompt engineering, and caching, integrating multimodal and external knowledge sources to enrich AI insights, researching and deploying autonomous agentic AI for complex multi‑step legal workflows, staying current with advances in model architectures, alignment, interpretability, and multi‑agent orchestration, and collaborating with software engineers to transition experimental models into production‑ready systems.
• • Lawhive is a regulated law firm with an AI‑native platform at its core, backed by top‑tier investors such as Google Ventures, Balderton Capital, and TQ Ventures, and recently secured a $60M Series B round in early 2026 to fuel international expansion. Headquartered in London with a successful US launch in 2025, the company operates Lawhive Labs—a frontier lab that unites world‑class engineering, design, AI, and legal talent to build the future of law. The firm emphasizes diversity of thought as a driver of outlier outcomes and is committed to building an inclusive team as it scales.
• • In this role you will gain deep expertise in state‑of‑the‑art LLMs, retrieval‑augmented generation, and autonomous AI agents while seeing your research move from prototype to production impact. You will work alongside leading AI and legal experts, contribute to a fast‑growing startup with meaningful equity, publish or present findings from cutting‑edge experiments, and help reshape how legal services are delivered globally, achieving both technical mastery and tangible societal impact.