About Linklaters

Linklaters is a global law firm, with 31 offices in 21 countries worldwide.

We have been named as one of The Times’ Top 50 Employers for Gender Equality for the tenth consecutive year; recognised by Stonewall as a top 10 employer for LGBTQ+ inclusion, and by the Social Mobility Employer Index as a top employer for advancing social mobility. 

We love hearing from anyone who is enthusiastic about changing the Legal industry. Not sure you meet all qualifications? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! At Linklaters, we are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply.

The Role

As we expand our Data Strategy & Governance team, we are hiring for a Senior Data Scientist to join us at the forefront of pioneering data science solutions to augment the expertise of our lawyers. Responsibilities will include:

• Researching and developing state-of-the art AI systems to solve real-world challenges within LegalTech
• Exploring new AI methods through independent study, attending industry-leading conferences, developing frameworks for scientific experimentation.
• Collaborating with practice teams, data scientists and data engineers to design, develop, and deploy data science solutions that leverage NLP and large language models to address complex legal challenges, ensuring ethical AI practices and legal compliance.
• Applying NLP techniques for extracting predefined categories of information from large-scale, unstructured data across multi-domain and multilingual legal documents, with a focus on data privacy and security.
• Developing and optimizing LLM-based agentic workflows (e.g. Langchain, AutoGen), ensuring model interpretability and explainability for legal applications.
• Developing high-quality, production-ready code for internal use cases, including document drafting, data extraction, and labelling, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and adherence to best practices.
• Designing and executing rigorous research frameworks and experimentation plans to evaluate the performance and impact of NLP and Generative AI solutions in the legal context.
• Implementing and maintaining model monitoring systems to ensure ongoing compliance with legal and ethical standards.

About You

• Minimum 5 years’ experience in Data Science with proven track record of delivering NLP focused projects (preferably document analysis).
• Advanced proficiency in Python and relevant NLP libraries (e.g. Langchain, Langraph, LlamaIndex, Hugging Face Transformers).
• Advanced proficiency in Python, PyTorch or similar deep learning frameworks.
• Demonstrated expertise in working with large language models (LLMs) and transformer architectures (e.g. Llama3, Gemini), including advanced prompt engineering (e.g. Chain of Thought prompting, Prompt Chaining, Long Context Window, agentic flows), and fine-tuning (e.g., LoRa, QLoRa).
• Experience working with Azure cloud infrastructure. (Azure AI, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services). Knowledge of GCP Vertex AI is a bonus.
• Proficiency in using Azure DevOps for version control.
• Experience with model interpretability and explainability techniques, particularly as applied to legal AI systems.
• Familiarity with LLMOps, including deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of data solutions.
• Publications at relevant conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD.
• Outstanding communication skills and data-driven decision-making collaboration with Product and Business teams.

The Team

The Data Strategy & Governance team is a small but expanding function encompassing Data Management, Data Governance and Data Science. The firm is embarking on a journey to properly govern, utilize and democratise its data and this is an opportunity to get in at the ground floor. Data is integral to our work in the Generative AI space and this role provides abundant opportunity to be a major part of what makes that programme a success.

Complementing the team will be Engineers and Architects dedicated to transitioning how the firm leverages advanced data technologies, ensuring a collaborative and integrated approach to innovation.

Our Benefits

Joining Team Linklaters will see you qualify for a range of benefits designed to reward the vital contribution you'll be making to our success. These include:

Health & Wellbeing:

• Private Medical Insurance
• Free in-house fitness centre and subsidised health club memberships
• Free onsite GP service and periodic health assessments

Finance:

• Pension and flexible savings options
• Income protection and life assurance
• Mortgage advice and will-writing services.

Family & Lifestyle:

• Electric car and cycle to work schemes.
• Emergency family care
• Additional holiday/birthday leave.
• Maternity/paternity/shared parental leave.
• Travel insurance and season ticket loan
• Option to join sports and social clubs, as well as our employee networks groups (such as our Gender Equality, With Pride, or Social Mobility Networks)

Technical Skills

This list of duties and responsibilities above is not exhaustive.  It is intended to describe the general content of, and requirements for, the performance of this job. As such, the role may also include the undertaking of additional tasks as required.

Application Policy

Applications and CVs (direct or via agency) are only accepted online via the portal. Queries related to our roles must be directed to the relevant recruitment team and not the partners, practices or stakeholders (lateralrecruitment@linklaters.com for legal roles or ukbtrecruitment@linklaters.com for business team roles).