Legal Engineer

Reporting to: Head of Legal Engineering (working closely with the CEO)

Location: London hybrid / remote (UK-based)

Salary: £35,000–50,000 + Opportunity for equity

About Us

Lexical Labs is an innovative legal technology company specialising in AI-driven contract analysis and review. Our mission is to revolutionise the legal sector by automating routine contract tasks, enabling legal professionals to focus on high-value strategic work. We blend cutting-edge Large Language Models (LLMs) with deep legal expertise to deliver precise, reliable, and insightful data-driven solutions.

We offer an exciting environment for ambitious individuals passionate about technology, innovation, and transforming the future of legal work.

We’re now hiring a Legal Engineer — a hybrid legal-and-technical role at the heart of how we design, build, and deliver our automated contract review systems.

The Role

This is a hands-on, influential role that sits at the intersection of legal practice, product design, and AI implementation.

As Legal Engineer, you’ll help design and refine our automated contract review workflows, build and maintain negotiation playbooks, shape prompts and evaluation datasets for LLMs, and ensure our products genuinely align with how lawyers and in-house teams actually work.

You’ll work closely with our Head of Legal Engineering, engineers, and founders to:

• Encode legal judgment into scalable, repeatable systems; and
• Bridge the gap between “how lawyers think” and “how machines operate”.

This role is ideal for a lawyer or legal professional who enjoys the technical side of things, is curious about how AI works under the hood, and is excited by the idea of building tools rather than just using them.

What You’ll Do

Automated Contract Review & Legal Workflows

• Assist in the design and development of automated solutions for reviewing contracts, identifying risks, and surfacing negotiation positions.
• Analyse existing legal workflows (e.g. intake, review, escalation, approval) to identify where automation can streamline processes and reduce errors.
• Help define and refine issue taxonomies, risk categories, and decision trees that underpin our automated review.

Playbook Development & Maintenance

• Develop and maintain tailored contract playbooks that capture positions, fall-backs, risk ratings, and internal guidelines.
• Work with internal and client teams to keep playbooks current with evolving policies, case law, and commercial strategy.
• Translate playbooks into structures that can be used effectively by LLM-based systems (e.g. rules, templates, structured data).

Prompt Engineering & LLM Workflow Design

• Collaborate with developers to design, test, and refine prompts and workflows for LLMs, ensuring outputs are accurate, consistent, and useful to legal users.
• Experiment with different prompting strategies, instructions, and context formats to reduce hallucinations and capture nuanced legal reasoning.
• Document patterns, edge cases, and best practices so we can scale what works across matters and clients.

Data Assets, Evaluation & Product Testing

• Prepare, label, and curate legal datasets for training and evaluating our systems (e.g. annotated clauses, test contracts, gold-standard answers).
• Support the design of evaluation pipelines: define what “good” looks like, craft test scenarios, and help measure quality and risk.
• Test new product features end-to-end, identify failure modes, and provide structured feedback to the engineering team.
• Help ensure our products stay tightly aligned with the needs of lawyers and contract managers in practice.

Demos, Training & Client Support

• Support product demos and proof-of-concepts by preparing realistic example documents, workflows, and playbooks.
• Contribute to user training, documentation, and internal FAQs, helping legal users understand how to get the best from our tools.
• Act as a subject-matter bridge in client conversations, translating between legal context and technical implementation.

What We’re Looking For

• Legal experience with contracts: familiarity with commercial contract lifecycles and workflows in law firms or in-house legal teams, including experience drafting, reviewing, and negotiating contracts.

• Workflow and systems mindset: ability to break down complex legal processes into clear steps, rules, and decision paths that can be encoded into software.

• Analytical and problem-solving skills: comfortable dealing with ambiguity, spotting edge cases, and designing pragmatic solutions to complex challenges.

• Technical aptitude: comfort engaging with technical teams, especially around AI and LLM-based products. Some hands-on technical experience of any kind (for example: Excel modelling, working with structured data, basic scripting/SQL, using APIs or developer tools, or similar). You don’t need to be a software engineer, but you should enjoy learning and using technical tools.

• Attention to detail: strong instinct for accuracy and consistency, particularly around legal concepts, risk classifications, and data quality.

• Collaboration and communication: excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work across legal, product, and engineering teams.

• Startup mindset: a proactive, hands-on attitude and ability to thrive in a flexible, fast-moving environment. You’re comfortable with evolving responsibilities and the occasional “all hands on deck” moment.

Bonus Points

• Qualification as a solicitor or equivalent, or significant in-house / law firm experience in commercial contracts.
• Experience in legal tech, contract lifecycle management (CLM), or legal operations.
• Familiarity with Large Language Models (LLMs) or generative AI, whether through previous roles, side projects, or self-directed learning.
• Experience working with structured legal data (e.g. clause libraries, playbooks, matter taxonomies) or with tools such as CLM platforms, document automation systems, or basic data analysis.
• Coding experience.

Why Join Us

• Directly shape how AI is used in contract review and negotiation for leading organisations.
• Collaborate closely with founders, engineers, and legal experts, influencing both product direction and company culture.
• Join early enough to have real impact, with the potential to grow as the company scales and benefit from our success through equity options.
• Work in a flexible, ambitious, and supportive environment where experimentation and learning are encouraged.

How to Apply

Join Lexical Labs to help build the future of AI-powered contract analysis.

Send your CV and a brief note explaining your interest in the Legal Engineer role to hiring@lexicallabs.com. We’d love to hear from you.