AI Engineer
About jhana
jhana is an early-stage, seed-funded startup that builds intelligent practice tools for the law across research, drafting, and document management. Our first product, India’s first AI paralegal, is live in an open-access beta at https://jhana.ai. We have ongoing POCs for legal workflow and document generation automation products, focusing on tools that passively adapt to a given firm or company’s data and norms. We hold fellowships and honors at nonprofit, academic, and technical programs. More details are available to candidates.
About the Role
This role will be part of a senior AI development team, tasked with researching, engineering, and launching cutting-edge AI products. This team will be responsible for: working with the product team to design technologies that serve user needs; innovating and creating novel solutions in the legal-tech space; and iterating on these solutions as the userbase and product evolve. All members of this team will be deeply experienced, product- and user-oriented, and up to date with the latest research and technologies in the field.
The vertical
Our products work with our proprietary corpora of ~13M structured documents as well as with internal documents of clients. Efficient, comprehensive billion-scale search is fundamental to our product. This broader technical problem further interacts with the complexity of the law. For instance, cites-cited-by graphs and graphs of precedent undergoing appeal or overruling inform the relevance of a result. And precedents can be good citation matches for complex reasons, wherein cases from unrelated areas or questions of the law can constitute important precedent. We attempt to excel at these challenges by using simple models for preprocessing, by sequencing traditional and cutting-edge techniques, and by carefully reranking and postprocessing results. This helps deliver generative AI that is anchored to information retrieval and cites and quotes all its claims.
The day-to-day
This is an intermediate role distributed across research, engineering, and product. Relatedly, it is a combination of invention and optimization. These are the problem statements that this role will likely continue or begin our work on—
Measurement
-
Constructing measures of search reliability/comprehensiveness and success/effectiveness; comparing ordered sets of search results; relevant notions of similarity and distance to evaluate IR
-
Implementing and automating benchmarks using labeled data and expert human feedback, interfacing with our legal research fellows
-
Measures of the popularity of a result for a class of queries, to enable reranking by observing users
Optimization/Scaling/Elasticity
-
Indexing algorithms and data structures, and infrastructure for billion-scale, multi-engine search
-
Pre- and post-processing hacks, eg. query design
-
Segmentation, sharding, concurrency and parallelism, and other clever distribution methods—optimizing latency and time and memory complexity
-
Low-dimensional/cost-optimized retrieval methods for enterprise settings
Invention
-
Identifying, finetuning, and aligning new vector embedding methods
-
Reranking and boosting from data augmentation and live user interaction emit
-
Caching mechanisms for high-variance natural language queries
Skills & Qualifications
Required Skills
-
Backend: Experience with API development and RESTful services, ideally with proficiency in Django/Python.
-
Vector Databases: Experience with vector databases, especially FAISS or Milvus, and how they integrate with machine learning systems.
-
LLM Knowledge: Understanding and hands-on experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs) in applications.
-
Search Stacks & Agents: Previous experience building search stacks, agents, or intelligent information retrieval systems.
-
RAG Pipelines: Knowledge of building and enhancing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.
Added Bonuses
-
Databases: Solid knowledge of SQL and database design.
-
Search Technologies: Familiarity with ElasticSearch and implementing search-based features.
-
Cloud: Hands-on experience with AWS for deploying and managing cloud-based applications.
-
Containerization: Proficiency with Docker for containerized development and deployment.
-
Frontend: Proficiency in JavaScript or Typescript
-
UI/UX: Experience with MaterialUI and collaborating on responsive, user-centric designs.
-
Design Tools: Experience creating designs or wireframes using Figma or other design tools.
About the Team
We are a public benefit corporation headquartered in Bangalore. We operate in rapidly changing legal systems with awareness of the stakes at hand. Our intention is to influence beneficence and alignment into the technological systems that are augmenting and replacing human institutions. Our team spans diverse identity and training, from physics and mathematics to law and public policy. We are small, fast-moving, horizontally flat, and built on collaboration between lawyers, academics, and engineers. We ship fast, and every line of code our team writes has a >0.9 expectation of making it to production.
What we offer
-
Competitive salary and benefits package.
-
Opportunities for growth and professional development.
-
ESOPs and ownership.
-
High potential for vertical and horizontal growth.
-
Collaborative and dynamic work environment.
-
The chance to work with cutting-edge technologies and make a real impact on a high-stakes industry with a transformative impact on human lives and commercial economies.
Miscellany
The expected compensation range is INR 30-50 lakhs per annum and may include equity. Compensation is negotiable based on levels and mutual excitement.
This role will start ASAP and requires in-person presence for at least 4 days of the week at our Bangalore HQ. Full remote is negotiable for superlative candidates who are not India-based.
Come as you are: we are a diverse team constituted by members of different backgrounds in nationality, religion, caste, gender, and sexual orientation. We sincerely and wholeheartedly welcome diverse individuals.