Director of Artificial Intelligence
$165,000–$200,000 year
On-site · Chicago, Illinois, United States
Job Summary
Director of Artificial Intelligence to design, build, and deploy agentic AI systems for a regulated professional-services environment. This hands-on leadership role requires architecting and shipping production AI applications, including agentic workflows, tool calls, and memory/state management; building end-to-end data pipelines and orchestration layers; selecting models and ensuring security, privacy, and compliance; collaborating with attorneys, KM, security, and IT; evaluating vendors and guiding build-vs-buy decisions; and leading a small team of engineers in advancing the firm’s AI capabilities.
Required Qualifications
- Minimum 5 years of technology experience, including at least 3 years building and deploying production AI/ML applications
- Demonstrated experience building agentic AI systems (tool/function calling, multi-step or multi-agent orchestration) and integrating with external systems
- Strong software engineering skills: Python, REST/streaming APIs, SQL and vector databases
- Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines, embeddings, evaluation, and observability for LLM/agent apps
- Experience with open-weight models on-premises/private-cloud infrastructure
- Experience designing AI systems with security, privacy, and confidentiality constraints (data leakage prevention, least-privilege access, encryption, audit logging)
- Familiarity with AI governance and risk frameworks (ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF) and data-privacy regulation
- Ability to collaborate with security, IT, and non-technical stakeholders and communicate technical concepts to attorneys and leadership
- Preferred: background in law firms or regulated professional services; understanding of privilege and work-product doctrine; experience with MCP servers; familiarity with legal tech platforms (document review, contract analysis, legal research)
- Degree in CS/engineering/data science or related field; advanced degree or JD a plus but not required
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