Graduate AI Engineer

Company Description

Essential Counsel specialises in providing strategic guidance to businesses during critical moments. Our expertise lies in helping organisations navigate complex governance challenges by understanding their unique situations, identifying risks, and crafting effective strategies. We prioritise a well-coordinated response to crises, delivering clarity and resolution under tight time constraints. Our mission is to empower clients with smart, actionable solutions tailored to their needs.

What we are building

We are building a new AI legal world. Not a feature. Not a product. A legal world.

We are developing agentic AI systems and digital twins that will fundamentally change how legal work is done. The vision is not modest , that is for sure. We are coming for the establishment, the biggest firms on the planet on the planet, the most entrenched institutions in professional services. We are not afraid of them. We are energised by them.

We play offence. All the time. We separate signal from noise. We finish the job. Always!

If you want to spend your career doing careful, guided, micro managed work inside a structure built to resist change, this is not the role for you and this is not a place for you. If you want to build things that did not exist before and watch them work, keep reading.

The Work

You will research and build AI systems that do real legal work; document analysis, contract review, legal research automation, compliance monitoring and agentic workflows that operate with minimal human intervention.

You will work on digital twins that model people, legal scenarios, entities and processed with precision. You will design and deploy systems where accuracy is not optional because the stakes are high and the consequences of getting it wrong are real.

You will work on digital and deploy systems where accuracy is not optional because the stakes are very high and the consequences of getting it wrong are real.

You will work alongside senior legal practitioners, clients. Not in a dark back room. You will understand the problem before you write a line of code. You will be responsible for the output, not just the input.

To be clear, this is not a graduate scheme. There is no hand-holding. There is pace, ambition, and the expectation that you will operate as a professional from day one.

Who You Are

We are not, not, looking for the best CV in the pile. We are looking for the sharpest mind, the most restless curiosity, and the highest drive. The person who built things nobody asked them to build. Who reads things nobody assigned. Who cannot switch off when a problem is unsolved

You are someone who:

• Brings relentless energy and genuinely positive outlook. Not performed positivity. Real forward momentum.
• Takes full ownership. You do not wait to be told. You see what needs doing and you do it.
• Deploys common sense before asking questions. You think, then you act.
• Treats AI as a tool you have already mastered, not a subject you are studying.
• Is not scared of complexity but cuts through it with extreme simplification.
• Finishes what they start. Every time.

What You Need to Bring

A recent degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, or related STEM field is the starting point. What matters more is what you have built.

You must be able to demonstrate:

• Strong Python, solid understanding of LLM orchestration, agent architecture, API integrations and backend services.
• Hands on experience with LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, prompt engineering and external API calls.
• Familiarity with full stack web development including FASTAPI, PostgreSQL, WebSockets, Docker and cloud deployment on GCP or equivalent.
• A working understanding of core NLP techniques: tokenisation, embeddings, sentiment analysis and text classification.
• Comfort with Agile and Scrum methodology, sprints and tools including GitHub, Jira and Confluence.
• Solid foundations in statistics, machine learning and data analysis methods including classification and supervised and unsupervised learning.

Useful but not essential:

• Experience with document processing, text mining, or information extraction from unstructured data.
• Familiarity with ML frameworks including PyTorch, TensorFlow or scikit-learn.
• Knowledge of legal document formats, OCR technologies or legal databases.
• Understanding GDPR, legal professional priviledge and compliance requirements in a legal or regulated environment.