www.clearygottlieb.com

Data Scientist

Springbok AI by Cleary Gottlieb

Location: Remote (UK)

About Us:

Springbok AI by Cleary Gottlieb is where cutting-edge AI meets elite legal expertise.

We’re not just “digitising documents” — we’re building the future of legal work from the ground up. Our team is made up of AI engineers, data scientists, software engineers, and innovation nerds who are obsessed with making legal processes smarter, faster, and enjoyable to use.

You’ll be joining the AI Acceleration Team — the group responsible for shipping experimental AI workflows, co-pilots, and tools that lawyers want to use. It’s fast-paced, highly collaborative, and deeply creative work. We move quickly, test constantly, and have the rare backing of a world-class law firm that wants to change how legal work gets done.

This isn’t your standard “legal tech” gig. This is your chance to be in the room where it happens — shaping the next generation of AI-powered legal tools with one of the sharpest teams in the game.

The Role:

We’re looking for a Data Science Manager who leads teams in turning complex legal data into powerful AI models. You’ll be part strategic leader, part technical architect, part team builder.

If you’re passionate about LLMs, document intelligence, and building AI that transforms how lawyers work, this role is for you.

We work extensively with LLMs, so you should too. We need someone who’s led teams building impressive LLM solutions — pipelines, agents, systems you can demonstrate and discuss in detail.

You should have experience with:

  • Prompt Engineering
  • Deep Research-type models
  • Document understanding and extraction pipelines
  • Vector embeddings and semantic search technologies
  • Multi-modal models
  • AI agent architectures

Strong ML fundamentals are essential. You should understand why an LLM excels at certain tasks but fails at others — because you genuinely understand what’s happening with transformer architectures.

Software engineering skills are valuable but not required. You must write clean, readable Python code. Research-grade is the minimum; production-ready code is a significant advantage.

Legal background isn’t required, but genuine curiosity about legal work is essential — if contracts and legal processes don’t interest you, this isn’t the right fit. Experience with document automation or legal workflows is a strong plus.

Experience with Spark or Databricks and other data lake technologies is helpful but not essential.

This is a hands-on leadership role focused on simultaneously working with and guiding teams to build practical solutions that lawyers will use daily, balancing hands-on technical work with team management.

What You’ll Actually Be Leading:

  • Leading AI model development: guide your team in building document classifiers, contract analyzers, and tools that genuinely improve legal workflows.
  • Data Strategy & Engineering: Lead the transformation of legal data into structured, high-quality datasets that power our AI models.
  • Technical Architecture: Guide the development of custom LLM architectures for legal applications — precise clause extraction, comprehensive risk assessment, and intelligent document analysis
  • Framework Leadership: Lead the design of rigorous evaluation frameworks, drive rapid iteration, and ensure our models deliver real value
  • Strategic Innovation: Keep your team current with AI/ML developments and identify opportunities to apply cutting-edge techniques to legal challenges
  • Backlog Management: Managing the Data Science backlog of projects and assigning projects and tasks to team members.
  • Project Reporting: Reporting to the Senior Manager of AI Acceleration on the active and prospective projects undertaken by the data science team.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with engineers and legal experts to build solutions that address real business needs.
  • Team Leadership & Collaboration: Lead your data science team while collaborating closely with engineers and legal experts to build solutions that address real business needs.
  • Line Management: Mentorship and direct line management of members of the data scientist team.

You Sound Like Our Person If:

  • Deep ML expertise: training, evaluation, deployment, and strong statistical foundations.
  • NLP specialization: expertise with transformers, current with LLM developments, and understanding of underlying architectures.
  • Coding Skills: Strong Python skills and experience with LLM frameworks like LangGraph, LangChain, and LlamaIndex.
  • Data expertise: you excel at finding patterns in complex datasets and extracting actionable insights
  • Problem-solving mindset: when models underperform, you investigate, experiment, and iterate until you find effective solutions

What We Need You To Have:

  • 5+ years building ML/AI systems in production environments, with 2+ years in a leadership or senior technical role
  • Strong NLP experience, particularly with complex documents and structured text
  • Hands-on LLM experience including fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and model optimization
  • Python fluency plus the usual suspects (pandas, numpy, LangGraph, LangChain, Hugging Face)
  • Cloud platform experience (we’re AWS and Azure) and MLOps skills for actually shipping models
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with ability to break down complex challenges
  • Genuine excitement about pushing AI boundaries in specialized domains
  • Proven experience managing and developing technical teams, with strong communication and mentorship skills
  • Strong leadership and people management skills with ability to motivate, develop, and retain top talent
  • Excellent communication skills with ability to present complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • Strong project management and organizational skills with ability to prioritize competing demands and deliver results on time
  • Collaborative mindset with ability to work effectively across cross-functional teams and build strong stakeholder relationships
  • Adaptability and resilience in fast-paced, evolving environments with ability to manage ambiguity and change
  • Experience setting technical strategy and roadmaps for data science initiatives

Extra Credit:

  • Startup or fast-paced AI environment experience
  • PhD in something quantitative and impressive
  • Vector databases, retrieval systems, or knowledge graphs experience
  • Legal tech, fintech, or other “move fast but don’t break compliance” industry background
  • Publications or open-source contributions that make us go “wow”
  • Experience scaling data science teams in high-growth environments

Why You’ll Love Working Here:

  • Your AI models will directly impact how legal work gets done across a leading global law firm
  • Join a focused team with the resources and ambition to transform an entire industry
  • Accelerated learning across legal domain expertise, product development, and cutting-edge AI research
  • Lead and grow a world-class data science team while shaping the technical direction of AI in legal services

If you are interested in applying, please submit a CV and short cover letter to the London Human Resources Team, LON-HR@cgsh.com.