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
Skills Required
- 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 detailed requirements
- Local to New York City and available for regular in-person working sessions
What We Do
Legalist is an institutional alternative asset management firm. The firm uses data-driven technology to invest in credit assets at scale. Legalist combines proprietary sourcing technology with rigorous underwriting expertise to generate risk-adjusted returns for its clients.
