Staff Applied Scientist - Search

Robin is on a mission to rebuild the legal industry — starting with making contracts simple for everyone. We are a pioneer in Legal AI, built on proprietary models, licensed data, and deep partnerships with Anthropic and AWS. Since 2019, we’ve expanded our footprint to 4 continents and have been supporting many of the world’s most successful businesses, including GE, Pfizer, KPMG, and UBS.

What will you do as a Staff Research Scientist?

You will be leading, designing and experimenting with cutting edge research on how to best solve pressing issues surfacing in the legal domain. You will apply your expertise in machine learning, data science, and behavioural modelling to drive meaningful insights and innovations.

As AI agents become the norm in this industry, so does the need for efficient legal information retrieval, semantic search capabilities, and structured knowledge representation. Your work will bridge the gap between advanced search technologies and the complex information needs of the legal domain, making legal knowledge more accessible, navigable, and actionable.

Your day-to-day responsibilities:

• Develop and advance knowledge extraction and representation methods - we’re particularly interested in people keen on:

  • structured knowledge extraction from legal texts and images

  • knowledge graphs/ontology engineering

  • legal knowledge base construction

  • specialised embedding methods for multimodal content in the legal domain

• Develop methods for retrieval and reasoning over legal knowledge bases and systems (e.g. hybrid search approaches combining symbolic and neural techniques, query understanding and rewriting for legal search)

• Performing fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to teach language models how to interact with new information architectures.

• Building “hard” eval sets to help identify failure modes of how language models work with legal data.

• Build infrastructure for running experiments and visualising results.

• Work with colleagues to communicate results internally and publicly.

• Stay updated with the latest research in machine learning, AI, knowledge representation and retrieval to bring innovative solutions to the table.

• Mentor junior researchers and contribute to building a collaborative, knowledge-sharing culture.

Ideally, you should have the following qualifications:

• A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

• Strong expertise in machine learning algorithms, statistical methods, and optimisation techniques.

• Have a strong track record of scientific research (in any field), and have done work on information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, structured knowledge extraction, or large-scale data analytics.

• You view research and engineering as two sides of the same coin. Every team member writes code, designs and runs experiments, and interprets results.

• Experience (or desire to be) working in multi-disciplinary teams.

What’s in it for you

• Salary: Competitive

• Hybrid schedule: We offer a flexible working schedule. #LI-HYBRID

• Equity package: Generous equity scheme - everyone gets to be an owner of Robin AI!

• Annual leave: 25 days PTO, in addition to the bank holidays observed in the UK.

• Health and wellbeing: Comprehensive health insurance, mental healthcare, gym discounts and cycle to work scheme.

• Growth opportunities: We prioritise promotions for high performers and help you to progress your career.

Our culture and values attract people who are creative, resourceful, and share our passion for excellence. At Robin, you're encouraged to push yourself and empowered to take risks. We support each other to think big, try new ideas, and navigate uncertainty. Whether you're at our headquarters or one of our worldwide offices, you'll find a world of opportunities to grow, thrive, and make a meaningful impact. See what life is like at Robin.

We are committed to building one of the most diverse technology companies in the world. As of 2024, more than 30% of our employees come from ethnic minority backgrounds, and 51% of roles are held by women. We know that transforming the legal industry requires diverse perspectives, so we're creating an environment where innovation thrives through inclusion.

Robin operates a direct hiring model and any speculative CVs shared via agencies will be treated as a gift.