Staff Applied Scientist Document Vision

Posted Yesterday
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19 Locations
In-Office or Remote
197K-295K Annually
Senior level
Legal Tech • Software
Organize data. Discover the truth. Act on it.
The Role
Lead document-vision research and production systems for multimodal legal evidence understanding. Define evaluation standards, frame hard problems, design and ship models, run efficacy studies and monitoring, mentor senior scientists, and advise leadership on scientific direction.
Summary Generated by Built In

Posting Type

Remote/Hybrid

Job Overview

The Work
Every legal matter is its own experiment. An attorney arrives with a theory of the case; the evidence arrives as hundreds of thousands of documents, sometimes millions, that no one has read and no model has seen. Somewhere in the cross product of the two are the answers that decide lawsuits, investigations, and livelihoods. Finding them quickly and defensibly, with the integrity and credibility attorneys can rely on, is the problem we own. We solve it creatively and rigorously.
Relativity is a data-centered, AI-native legal technology company, and Applied Science builds the AI inside Relativity aiR. We launched aiR in 2023 and have now run commercial generative AI in the legal domain for more than three years, powering work that includes the largest investigations in the world. Our systems are distinguished by the data they operate over (more than 93 petabytes) and the work they have done: over 190 million AI review decisions, backed by more than 1 billion generative sub-analyses in 2026 alone. The team is as distinctive as the data: legal experts, all former litigators, work directly inside Applied Science.
At Relativity, our mission is to Organize data. Discover the truth. Act on it. The Applied Science team serves this mission by building bold and ambitious AI systems. We are curious, dedicated, and humble. We understand complexity, uphold rigor, and measure relentlessly. We build and ship with pace. Above all, we are interdisciplinary collaborators and team players.
We're looking for a Staff Applied Scientist to take on our hardest problems in document vision and set standards that reach beyond a single team.

Job Description and Requirements

Capable and Reliable

Two requests can look nearly identical and be worlds apart. "See if you can find me an example of this" needs a capable system: it finds the example or it doesn't. "Conduct a reasonable search for any and all documents responsive to this request" is a different kind of promise. Its answer spans a corpus no one will ever read end-to-end. So the system's process, as much as its output, has to earn the trust of the professionals who rely on it.

That property is reliability. It decomposes into consistency, robustness, calibration, and safety: systems that behave tomorrow the way they did today, degrade predictably under stress, know how confident they should be, and check their own work. Before aiR returns an analysis, it validates its citations and runs internal consistency checks; when a check fails, it refuses to answer. It has refused more than a million times so far in 2026, and we count every one as a success: an error caught before it reached a user.

You'll build for both, and help define the standard for how.

The Focus: Document Vision

This role anchors our document-vision work: teaching systems to read evidence the way legal professionals do. Real matters arrive as scanned pages, photographs, tables, handwriting, stamps, and broken layouts, at the scale of millions of documents. You'll own the science of multimodal document understanding across aiR, from vision-language modeling to the evaluation standards that make visual evidence usable and defensible.

What You'll Do

  • Take on the hardest, most ambiguous problems in the portfolio and produce clarity: a well-specified approach, an evaluation that settles the question, a system that ships.
  • Set standards that reach beyond your team: evaluation methods, modeling patterns, and quality bars adopted by scientists you've never worked with.
  • Own readiness for flagship AI systems, from problem framing through efficacy studies and production monitoring, in partnership with engineering.
  • Multiply the team through deep review and mentorship of senior and lead scientists.
  • Advise Applied Science leadership on where the science is going and where we should invest.

What You Bring

  • A master's or PhD in computer science or another quantitative discipline (or equivalent professional experience), and at least 6 years of applied AI/ML experience.
  • Years of production AI/ML behind you: systems you specified, shipped, and operated at scale, in partnership with the engineers who run them.
  • Expert judgment about AI systems: you've built them, measured them, and formed views of their limits that hold up under challenge.
  • Scientific rigor other people borrow: you supervise the data understanding of teams beyond your own, your evaluations become the template, and your error analyses end debates.
  • Software-engineering judgment trusted across teams, and the programming skill to credibly prototype what you propose.
  • An ownership mindset that extends across the organization.

Nice to Have

  • Experience with vision-language or document-understanding models (layout analysis, OCR-adjacent pipelines, table and figure extraction) in production.
  • An interest in legal technology and the justice system.
  • Experience developing information retrieval systems.
  • Experience developing agentic harnesses.
  • Experience building reliable AI systems at scale.

Why Relativity Applied Science

This is the place where your curiosity, dedication, and talent will build products that power the pursuit of justice around the world.

Relativity is committed to competitive, fair, and equitable compensation practices.

This position is eligible for total compensation which includes a competitive base salary, an annual performance bonus, and long-term incentives.

The expected salary range for this role is between following values:

$197,000 and $295,000

The final offered salary will be based on several factors, including but not limited to the candidate's depth of experience, skill set, qualifications, and internal pay equity. Hiring at the top end of the range would not be typical, to allow for future meaningful salary growth in this position. 

Required Skills:

Algorithms, Computer Vision, Data Analysis, Data Science, Deep Learning, Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Python (Programming Language), Scientific Research

Skills Required

  • Master's or PhD in computer science or another quantitative discipline (or equivalent professional experience)
  • At least 6 years of applied AI/ML experience
  • Experience specifying, shipping, and operating production AI/ML systems at scale
  • Programming skill and software-engineering judgment to prototype (Python)
  • Expert judgment about AI systems, including measurement of limits and robustness
  • Scientific rigor in evaluation design, data understanding, and error analysis
  • Ability to mentor and review senior and lead scientists and influence cross-team standards
  • Experience with vision-language or document-understanding models (layout analysis, OCR-adjacent pipelines, table and figure extraction)
  • Interest in legal technology and the justice system
  • Experience developing information retrieval systems
  • Experience developing agentic harnesses
  • Experience building reliable AI systems at scale

Relativity Compensation & Benefits Highlights

The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Relativity and has not been reviewed or approved by Relativity.

  • Leave & Time Off Breadth Time off options include discretionary time off and two company‑wide breaks each year, providing additional recharge time.
  • Healthcare Strength Health coverage includes comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans, telehealth access, and wellness resources such as a Headspace subscription.
  • Parental & Family Support North America offers up to 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, with comparable regional programs in EMEA and APAC.

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The Company
HQ: Chicago, IL
1,550 Employees
Year Founded: 2001

What We Do

At Relativity, we build innovative and comprehensive tools for making sense of unstructured data. When more people can find the facts in mountains of documents, emails, and texts, more legal and data-centric matters can be resolved equitably. Join us in our mission to help our customers organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. Relativity makes software to help users organize data, discover the truth and act on it. Its SaaS product, RelativityOne, manages large volumes of data and quickly identifies key issues during litigation and internal investigations. Relativity has more than 300,000 users in approximately 40 countries serving thousands of organizations globally primarily in legal, financial services and government sectors, including the U.S. Department of Justice and 198 of the Am Law 200. Relativity does not tolerate racism or discrimination of any kind. We do not accept unfair treatment of any person or group of people. We’re committed to advocating for change to make our world a more inclusive, just place.

Why Work With Us

We believe in our team members and we want to help you own your career as part of a community of values-driven people who help customers around the world solve complex data challenges. At Relativity, you’ll take on challenging work, but you’ll also partner with talented colleagues and pursue plenty of learning and development opportunities.

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