Senior Applied AI Engineer

Do you want to work on the smart AI assistant used daily by thousands of legal professionals? Do you have experience building AI solutions and want to make LegalMike smarter, more reliable, and more robust every day alongside our fantastic team? Here, you will have the opportunity to do just that. Through innovation and technology, we are democratizing access to justice.

What will you be doing?

As a Senior Applied AI Engineer, you will be responsible for the further development of our AI assistant, LegalMike. You will build agentic workflows, design and optimize robust RAG strategies, and implement guardrails that guarantee consistent, legally actionable output. You will work closely with the development team and take ownership of the AI domain, including architectural choices.

This is not a research role or a prompt engineering position. We are looking for an engineer who brings applied AI into production with a focus on robustness, evaluation, and scalability.

In this role:

You will design and implement agentic AI architecture for LegalMike, including tool calling, planners, and operators;
You will migrate existing RAG flows to more flexible agent-based setups;
You will develop fallback and abstention strategies for uncertain or incomplete situations;
You will collaborate with data engineers on RAG and retrieval challenges such as query decomposition, query expansion, and source selection;
You will improve retrieval strategies with a focus on quality and reproducibility;
You will set up AI evaluations (golden datasets, regression tests) and analyze failure modes.

Who are you?

You are a driven AI Engineer with at least five years of experience who enjoys building complex solutions that align with the customer’s world. You are analytical, pragmatic, and enjoy collaborating in multidisciplinary teams.

Essential requirements for this position are:

At least 5 years of experience as a software engineer;
Strong Python skills, including FastAPI, async programming, and type hints;
Proven experience with RAG systems in production and with LLM tool-calling, agents, and planners;
Experience evaluating, testing, and improving LLM output;
Ability to independently make well-considered and substantiated architectural choices;
A product-oriented mindset, with a focus on costs, latency, and reliability;
Good communication skills in English (team language);
Based in the Netherlands and available for hybrid work (at least 2 days per week at our office in Groningen).

Furthermore, it is a strong advantage if you have experience with:

Legal, compliance, or other regulated domains;
Vector databases and hybrid search;
PydanticAI, LangGraph, or similar frameworks.

Competencies we value:

Proactivity

You do not wait for problems to arise but think ahead about potential (technical) challenges. You take the initiative in identifying and resolving bugs, performance issues, and areas for improvement in the application before they become noticeable to users or the team.

Collaboration

You effortlessly translate functional requirements into technical solutions and know how to communicate complex technical information clearly to colleagues from various backgrounds. You actively contribute ideas and are skilled at sharing and receiving feedback.

Ownership

You feel responsible for the quality, maintainability, and performance of your code. You write clear, structured, and testable code and proactively ensure documentation and code reviews. You take responsibility when improvements are needed and ensure your code is durable and robust.

Pragmatic

You make well-considered trade-offs between speed and thoroughness, delivering solutions that are both practical and stable.

The LegalMike team

The LegalMike team consists of developers, legal professionals, and data specialists. Our team fosters an open and learning culture. We are critical, down-to-earth, dedicated, and look out for one another. We do not accept egos or mediocrity.

Employment conditions

Salary: €5,500 – €7,500, always tailored to your experience;
Employment type: Full-time;
Holidays: 27 vacation days + public holidays;
Location: Hybrid (minimum 2 days per week in Groningen);
Laptop: Laptop of your choice;
Travel allowance: Public transport or mileage allowance;
Regular team activities: Pub quizzes, running, social drinks, dinners.

What’s next?

Do you want to shape the future of legal practice with us? Apply now. Here is what the process looks like:

Application: You send your CV. Our recruiter will contact you;
Introduction: You will meet our CTO and co-founder of LegalMike;
In-depth interview: You will speak with a future direct colleague about the details of your work. Following this (after a short break), we will have a conversation about your competencies so we can get to know you better as a professional.
Offer: After a positive mutual feeling, you will receive an offer, and we will be happy to welcome you to our team!

More information?

Please contact Tim Spijker – Recruitment Business Partner at LegalMike.
06-42400400 / tim@legalmike.ai.