Legal Knowledge Engineer
Location: Remote, UK
- Are you ready to be the person who teaches AI how to think like a lawyer - and lawyers how tothink with AI?
- Do you want to join the team that’s not just building legal tech, but fundamentally rewriting therules of how legal work gets done?
- Do you want to work in a team with start-up vibes and have an actual impact on how the world’s sharpest legal minds work?
- Are you looking to join a team with a people-first culture where your ideas become reality, notbacklog items?
- Are you ready to shape the future of legal AI?
If you answered yes to all these questions, then keep reading because you’re in the right place!
Your Mission
As Legal Knowledge Engineer at Springbok AI by Cleary Gottlieb, your mission is to be the architect of legal AI’s future - transforming how the world’s most sophisticated legal minds harness artificial intelligence to solve complex problems. You’ll be the crucial bridge between cutting-edge AI capabilities and real-world legal practice, designing workflows that don’t just automate tasks but fundamentally reimagine how legal work gets done.
This isn’t about digitising existing processes - it’s about inventing entirely new ways for lawyers to think, work, and deliver value. You’ll be part legal strategist, part AI translator between lawyers and our AI product team, part innovation catalyst - turning the theoretical power of large language models into practical tools that lawyers actually love using.
About Springbok AI by Cleary Gottlieb
Springbok AI, powered 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 product experts who are obsessed with making legal processes smarter, faster, and actually enjoyable to use.
We’re responsible for shipping AI workflows, agents, and tools that lawyers and the business actually 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 genuinely 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 Team
We’re a tight-knit 12 person strong team, and we’re built on the values of meritocracy, pragmatism, honesty, and ownership. The combination of our diverse academic backgrounds - Physics, Neuroscience, Mathematics, Engineering, Psychology, etc - and our ability to draw on the latest findings in scientific research enables us to design cutting-edge solutions that make AI real – now inside Cleary Gottlieb. The Springbok AI team at Cleary is remote-first, but we have access to a beautiful office in London Moorgate for anyone who prefers to work in-person. We also get together for social team hangouts and off-sites.
The Role
We’re looking for a Legal Knowledge Engineer — a curious, tech-literate legal mind who can act as the glue between our engineers and the lawyers using our products. You’ll be part legal whisperer, part workflow wizard, part AI translator.
If you love thinking about how legal work should be done and want to help build the tools that make that possible, then this is the job for you.
You’ve trained as a lawyer, and you are a tech enthusiast. You love to learn about the capabilities of new LLM models or tools, and to get stuck in with trying things out. You definitely don’t need to be a developer, but you do need to be deeply interested in how lawyers think, how technology works, and how we can make those two worlds talk to each other better.
As Legal Knowledge Engineer at Springbok AI by Cleary Gottlieb, you’ll...
- Design legal workflows: Work with our team to turn complex legal processes into smooth, intuitive automations.
- Prompting: Work with our NLP specialists and tools to draft specifications for prompts, review prompts, and suggest improvements for prompts.
- Bridge the gap: Be the go-between for engineers and lawyers — translating legal needs into technical specs (and vice versa).
- Configure solutions: Help tailor our AI tools to real legal use cases — testing, iterating, and improving as you go.
- Support users: You’ll be the first line of support for our internal legal users, helping them get the most out of the tools we build.
- Collect and channel feedback: Gather user insights and pass them to the dev team in a clear, actionable way.
- Spot opportunities: Find areas where automation could save time, reduce errors, or make lawyers’ lives easier and help us build solutions for them.
About You
We’re looking for an excellent human to join our superstar team. As we continue to develop our internal portfolio, you’ll be instrumental in driving the next phase of our growth within the Firm. We’re just getting started!
The mindset and traits that make you successful at Springbok AI by Cleary Gottlieb
- You’re a fast learner with a growth mindset: this trait is by far the biggest indicator of success in the Springbok AI team.
- Legally trained and fluent: You have experience working as a lawyer and understand core legal concepts and workflows, and know how lawyers think and work.
- Tech-curious: you’re comfortable around AI, APIs, and techy terms like agents, steppers, MCPs, or chain-of-thought prompting.
- A natural translator: you can explain technical things to legal people and legal things to technical people.
- Self-directed: you like figuring things out, starting from scratch, and building processes where none exist yet.
- Problem-solver at heart: if something isn’t working, your instinct is to dig in and find a better way.
The experience that will give you a competitive advantage
- 3+ years PQE working within legal teams.
- Familiarity with legal workflows like drafting, summarising, and data extraction.
- Experience with the legal AI space — think Harvey, Legora, TR, Lexis, etc.
- Experience in chain-of-thought prompting.
- A genuine interest in AI and a desire to go beyond the buzzwords. You should be interested and actively exploring practical concepts such as chain-of-thought prompting, few-shot learning or vector retrieval. We don’t expect you to be an expert on day one, but we’ll be training you to be one within the first 90 days.
- Strong written and verbal communication — especially when translating complex concepts.
- An experimentation mindset.
Bonus Points
- Experience working in a startup, legal tech company, or being part of the process of building 0–1 products.
- Interest and experience in and on AI-powered applications, prompt engineering, or building interfaces around complex tech.
- Knowledge of practice development, KM, or legal ops.
- Any experience with website builders or light scripting (e.g. Framer, Squarespace).
- Background in legal service delivery — whether from a firm or a vendor.
- Familiarity with agile workflows or product-style team structures.
Research shows that candidates are less likely to apply to positions for which they do not meet 100% of the job criteria. If you’re excited about the role and meet some of the above criteria but are unsure whether you’re a good fit, we still strongly encourage you to apply. Here at Springbok AI by Cleary Gottlieb, your biggest indicator of success is your rate of learning, not pure experience.
Why you’ll love it here
- You’ll be building from the ground up — and your work will directly shape how lawyers work
- You’ll get to directly shape how we grow the team. We expect our team to grow rapidly in the next years, so there’s a good chance to grow your team and responsibilities.
- You’ll join a team that’s small, sharp, collaborative, and wildly ambitious – and know how to get things done.
- You’ll learn fast — about AI, product thinking, design, and more.
- You’ll have a voice. A loud one. We want your ideas, not just your execution You’ll learn more in 3 months than you would in 3 years elsewhere.
If you are interested in applying, please submit a CV and short cover letter to the London Human Resources Team, LON-HR@cgsh.com.