Legal Engineer

About Lawhive

Lawhive is a global, AI-native law firm. Operating in the US and UK, we’ve built our own agentic operating system for legal services.

We partner with leading Main Street law firms to give lawyers and back-office teams the AI platform, marketing, and operational support to grow faster than they could alone. Our specialized AI agent for legal work, Lawrence, works alongside lawyers, putting human legal judgment right where it belongs: at the center of every matter.

We most recently raised a $60M Series B at a $685M valuation, from investors including Google Ventures, TQ Ventures, Mitch Rales, Balderton Capital and Premier League footballers Harry Maguire and Reece James. In the last few years we've hit milestone after milestone, raising over $110M in funding. Today, we're on track to exceed $100 million in annual revenue, and we have offices in London, New York, Austin, and Phoenix.

So if you want your work to have real, tangible impact as we redefine an entire industry, Lawhive is where you can make it happen.

The Role

We're hiring our first Legal Engineer focused on immigration and removal defense in the US. You'll be a practicing (or previously practicing) deportation defense attorney who wants to build the tools, not just use them.

You'll work in two directions. With Product and Engineering, you'll shape deportation-specific functionality in Lawhive: how matters are opened, how deadlines and hearings are tracked, how filings are drafted and checked. With our partner firms, you'll configure Lawhive around how their attorneys and staff actually work, and keep tuning it until it saves them real time.

This is a hands-on role. You'll write workflows and prompts, test outputs against your own legal judgement, and decide what good looks like for a removal defense practice.

You'll start with an established immigration firm with offices and clients across the US. The firm handles much more than removal defense, so Lawhive needs to support its whole caseload.

What You'll Do

Build with Product

- Act as the subject-matter lead for removal defense: map the end-to-end matter lifecycle, from intake and NTA review through master and individual hearings, relief applications, BIA appeals and bond.
- Turn that knowledge into product requirements, workflows and acceptance criteria that engineers can build against.
- Design, test and refine the prompts, templates and checks our AI agent uses for immigration work (for example, EOIR filings, I-589 and cancellation of removal packages, evidence indexes, country conditions research).
- Build evaluation sets from real matter types and judge output quality as a practitioner would.
- Keep the product current as policy, EOIR practice and agency guidance change, aligning with our Legal Data librarian, maintaining the firm's context layer.

Work with partner firms

- Spend time with attorneys, paralegals and intake teams to understand where time is lost, then fix it in the product or in their setup.
- Run training and workshops so firms use more of the platform, and follow up on adoption.
- Measure the effect: time per matter, filing turnaround, matters handled per attorney.
- Bring firm feedback back to Product and help decide what gets built next.

Grow the function

- Write playbooks for configuring and supporting immigration firms, so the next legal engineer can pick them up.
- Help us decide how this model extends to other immigration practice areas.

What You'll Bring

- JD and active admission to at least one US state bar.
- 3+ years practicing removal defense, with your own caseload in immigration court: detained or non-detained, master and individual hearings, relief applications and appeals.
- Familiarity with federal court work for immigration clients, such as habeas petitions and mandamus actions.
- A clear view of where immigration practices lose time, and ideas for fixing it.
- Hands-on comfort with technology. You've built workflows, templates or automations, set up a case management system or used generative AI seriously in your own practice. You don't need to be a programmer.
- Good judgement on AI risk in a high-stakes practice area: what can be automated, what needs attorney review, and how to tell the difference.
- Clear communication with both attorneys and engineers. You can explain a cancellation of removal standard to a developer and a data model to a managing partner.
- Comfortable with ambiguity and with setting your own priorities in a fast-moving team.
 
## Interview process

- Introductory call with our Talent team
- 1:1 with your hiring manager
- Practical skills assessment
- Values interview with one of our Founders
- We offer!
 
## Benefits

- 🩺 Healthcare benefits: 'Premium' plan with 100% employee cover and 50% dependent cover
- ✈️ Vacation: 20 days + 11 Federal holidays + 1 day of Birthday leave
- 💰 401k: Matching contribution up to 2% of salary
- 💰 Meaningful early-stage share options
- 🌍 Work from anywhere for a month
- 💻 Top-spec Macbook
- ⛳️ Regular team building activities and socials!
 
## Diversity at Lawhive

At Lawhive we know that diversity of thought is critical to delivering outlier outcomes. As such, we’re always working hard to ensure we build a diverse, inclusive team. We’re not yet where we want to be but as we scale we’ll only ever increase the focus we apply to this.

Compensation

£190K – £270K • Offers Equity