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About This Role
Posting Type
Hybrid/Remote
Job Overview
WHO WE ARE
Relativity is a leading legal data intelligence company building technology that helps users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it with confidence. Our AI-powered, cloud platform, RelativityOne, transforms massive volumes of complex information into actionable insights for litigation, investigations, regulatory inquiries, data breach responses, and other high-stakes legal work where accuracy and trust are crucial.
The world’s largest law firms, corporations, and government agencies rely on Relativity’s legal AI software to securely surface and manage the most relevant and impactful information in their matters. Beyond our commercial impact, we are committed to expanding access to technology and supporting pro bono legal work.
WHAT WE DO
Gavel is a Microsoft Word-native agentic surface where lawyers perform real-time, evidence-based document editing and drafting. Gavel operates as a small, founder-led team within Relativity, connecting its product and engineering work with Relativity teams responsible for shared platform capabilities, identity, and security. Job Description and Requirements
ABOUT THE ROLE
As a Lead Software Engineer, you will be the full-stack technical owner for a major area of Gavel’s product, such as a family of agents or a core capability including the context pipeline, evaluation platform, or Word integration. You will own the technical plan across the front end, harness, and data layer, along with the quality of releases and the growth of the two to four engineers building the area with you.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. Roughly half of your time will be spent coding. You will work directly with Gavel’s CTO and Staff Engineer on architecture and represent your area to the broader Relativity technology team when it intersects with shared platform, identity, or security. The role reports to Pierre Martin, CTO of Gavel and VP of Engineering at Relativity, and may be based remotely in the United States or in Seattle or Chicago.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Own the technical roadmap and delivery for your area, from design through production monitoring. Break ambiguous product goals into shippable milestones and sequence them across the stack.
- Design and build agents and the infrastructure they run on, including tool definitions, prompts and context assembly, structured outputs, guardrails, evaluation sets, and the Word and web experiences that surface them.
- Run the evaluation and release loop for your agents. Understand acceptance rates, identify why results change, and determine whether a change is ready to ship.
- Model a modern software development lifecycle for your squad through small, frequent commits, feature-flagged production deployments, fast rollbacks, and daily use of agentic engineering tools to improve quality and velocity.
- Partner directly with Dorna Moini, Pierre Martin, product, and design on what to build next, and engage with customers when the answer is not clear from the data.
- Lead design reviews, establish coding and testing standards for your squad, mentor Senior and Advanced engineers, and participate in hiring.
- Work with Relativity platform and security teams on areas that touch shared infrastructure, identity, or compliance.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
Required
- 8+ years of experience building production software in service-oriented, continuously deployed teams, including at least 1 year shipping LLM-based products or features to real users.
- Direct experience building full-stack web applications and agentic applications, including ownership of at least one agentic capability in production involving tool use and function calling, multi-step orchestration, structured outputs, retries and failure handling, and observation and debugging of non-deterministic systems.
- Practical experience with evaluation, including building evaluation sets, selecting metrics, using LLM-as-judge appropriately, and connecting offline results to online outcomes.
- A solid grasp of retrieval and context engineering, including embeddings, hybrid search, chunking and ranking strategies, and context budgeting.
- Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience with AWS or Azure, or the willingness to develop deep expertise quickly, along with comfort using containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and production observability.
- Fluency in at least one of TypeScript or Python and the ability to work across the stack, including React front ends, Node or Python services, and PostgreSQL.
- Experience leading the technical work of a small team through planning, reviewing, unblocking, and developing engineers while continuing to deliver meaningful code.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain model-quality regressions to lawyers and scoping trade-offs to founders.
- A strong drive for simplicity and the judgment to distinguish useful abstractions from unnecessary ones.
WHY WE COULD BE A GREAT FIT
Impactful Mission
- Build systems that help customers organize data, discover the truth, and act on it in high-stakes legal matters.
Engineering at Scale
- Work on distributed, cloud-native systems that process large volumes of data.
Cutting-Edge Technology
- Build with AI, cloud platforms, and scalable architectures shaping legal tech.
Growth and Ownership
- Gain experience owning systems end-to-end across cloud and distributed environments.
Collaborative Culture
- Work in a team focused on knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
Inclusive Environment
- Diverse perspectives create stronger teams and better outcomes.
Compensation and Benefits
- Competitive salary, benefits, DTO, parental leave, and equity program.
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:
$150,000 and $224,000 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:
Documentations, Innovation, Leadership, Problem Solving, Process Improvements, Project Management, Quality Assurance (QA), Risk Management, Technical Knowledge, Troubleshooting
Salary Context
This $150K-$224K range is below the median for AI Software Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $192K across 146 roles with salary data).
Role Details
About This Role
AI Software Engineers build the applications and systems that AI models run inside. They own the API layers, data pipelines, frontend integrations, and infrastructure that turn a model into a product users interact with. Every AI company needs engineers who can build the software around the AI.
The challenge is building reliable systems around inherently unreliable components. Models are probabilistic. They'll give different answers to the same question. They hallucinate. They're slow. They're expensive. Your job is to build an application layer that handles all of this gracefully while delivering a product that users trust and enjoy.
Across the 8,943 AI roles we're tracking, AI Software Engineer positions make up 4% of the market. At Relativity, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: building API endpoints that serve model inference with caching and fallback logic, designing the data pipeline that feeds context to a RAG system, implementing streaming responses in the frontend, debugging a race condition in the async inference pipeline, and optimizing database queries for the vector search layer. It's full-stack engineering with AI at the center.
AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.
Skills Required
Full-stack engineering skills with AI integration experience. Python and TypeScript are the most common requirements. You'll need to understand API design, database architecture, and how to build reliable systems around probabilistic outputs. Experience with streaming, async processing, and caching patterns is increasingly important as real-time AI applications proliferate.
Knowledge of vector databases, embedding APIs, and LLM integration patterns (function calling, structured outputs, retry logic) differentiates AI software engineers from general software engineers. Understanding cost optimization (caching strategies, model routing, batched inference) is valuable since inference costs can dominate application economics.
Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Software Engineer roles pay a median of $220,000 based on 1,448 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $228,700. This role's midpoint ($187K) sits 15% below the category median. Disclosed range: $150K to $224K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,000.
Relativity AI Hiring
Relativity has 7 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Software Engineer, AI Product Manager, AI/ML Engineer. Based in IL, US. Compensation range: $155K - $262K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (521 positions) offer remote work, while 8,351 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,878 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,416 roles, $263,811 median); Los Angeles (1,340 roles, $210,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI Software Engineer roles include Software Engineer, Full-Stack Developer, Backend Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward Staff Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager.
If you're a software engineer, you're already 80% there. Learn the AI integration patterns: RAG, streaming inference, function calling, structured outputs. Build a project that demonstrates you can wrap an AI model in a production-quality application with proper error handling, caching, and user experience. That's the portfolio piece that gets you hired.
What to Expect in Interviews
Technical screens look like standard software engineering interviews with an AI twist. Expect system design questions about building reliable applications around probabilistic models: handling streaming responses, implementing retry logic for API failures, and designing caching strategies for LLM outputs. Coding rounds test standard algorithms plus practical integration patterns like async processing and rate limiting.
When evaluating opportunities: Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 8,943 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 175 entry-level, 4,132 mid-level, 3,268 senior, and 1,368 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (521 positions). The remaining 8,351 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 roles).
AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 8,943 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,739), AI Product Manager (403), AI Software Engineer (402). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (175) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,132) and senior (3,268) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,368 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (521 positions), with 8,351 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,380. Top-quartile roles start at $264,148, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,310. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,422 postings), Aws (808 postings), Azure (638 postings), Rag (555 postings), Gcp (457 postings), Pytorch (433 postings), Claude (341 postings), Kubernetes (337 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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