Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP · 12 hours ago
Associate Director, Engineering & Legal Technology
NYC Metro Area
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff, Director/Executive
$260K/yr - $300K/yr
10+ years expSimpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP is seeking an Associate Director of Engineering for their Knowledge & Innovation department. This role involves providing technical leadership and driving the development of legal technology solutions while mentoring a high-performing engineering team and collaborating with various stakeholders.
Law Practice
No H1B
Responsibilities
Lead engineering strategy and solution architecture for Knowledge & Innovation initiatives, ensuring scalability, security, and alignment with Firmwide technology standards
Design and oversee integrations across SaaS platforms, internal systems, data sources, and AI / LLM services used in legal workflows
Act as technical authority for evaluating, implementing, integrating and extending legal tech solutions (e.g., knowledge management, document intelligence, research, drafting, and workflow tools)
Serve as a key subject matter expert for enterprise search, semantic search, vector databases, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures
Provide input to document and data storage and organization approaches, to enable the most responsive and performant retrieval approaches
Partner with Data Science, Practice Solutions & the Firm’s Legal Practices to design AI-powered solutions that systematically surface Firm knowledge, precedents, and insights in a secure and auditable manner
Help establish best practices for data ingestion, indexing, retrieval, grounding, and evaluation of AI-driven search and generative systems
Conduct independent research to stay current on emerging retrieval techniques and their applicability to the Firm
Lead and mentor a small, high-performing engineering team supporting both custom development and SaaS configuration, integration and extension (focused on lawyer tools)
Work with IT to set technical direction, establish protocols, review designs and code, and ensure consistent engineering quality and documentation
Manage delivery across multiple initiatives, balancing rapid experimentation with production-grade reliability
Act as technical lead for vendor engagements, including solution viability, design reviews, integrations, and roadmap alignment
Oversee customization, configuration, and extension of SaaS legal tech platforms through APIs, middleware, and automation
Evaluate emerging legal technology and AI vendors in partnership with Practice Solutions, Data Science and Knowledge Management teams
Qualification
Required
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
10+ years of experience in software engineering, solution architecture, or platform engineering, with at least ~5 years in a technical leadership role
Demonstrated experience designing and implementing search platforms, semantic search, or RAG-based systems
Strong experience with cloud-based architectures, APIs, and modern development frameworks
Proven ability to lead small engineering teams and deliver complex, cross-functional initiatives
Preferred
Experience in legal technology, professional services, or other highly regulated environments
Experience with document-specific segmentation and storage approaches
Familiarity with LLM-integrated search platforms, vector databases, term frequency approaches, structural and hierarchical indexing, knowledge graphs, and corresponding AI governance considerations
Familiarity with document classification, text classification and named entity recognition techniques
Experience integrating and extending enterprise SaaS platforms
Exposure to knowledge management systems, document management systems (DMS), or legal research tools
Company
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP is one of the world’s leading international law firms.
1001-5000 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageLeadership Team
Kelly Stevens
Chief Operating Officer
Alan Turner
Partner
Recent News
2025-10-02
FinTech Global
2025-10-02
Company data provided by crunchbase