Founding Legal Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 20, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 7, 2026.
About Grubel
Grubel is a research lab that builds AI for high-stakes knowledge work, starting with law. Legal matters require specialized expertise, and each one involves its own facts, practices, parties, and institutions. General-purpose AI applies the same system to every legal matter, varying only what goes into a limited context window.
To meet the depth and diversity of legal work, we let every matter build its own AI: engineer the right data for the matter, adapt the model and agent to it, and track what improves. We combine the three into a matter-specific improvement loop that runs until the system delivers what the matter demands.
Grubel was founded in 2026 by Moritz Hardt, director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and formerly a UC Berkeley professor and Google Brain researcher; and Reinhard Heckel, professor of machine learning at the Technical University of Munich, on leave to build Grubel. The founding team includes engineers with PhDs in computer science and experience in foundation-model pretraining at Mistral and legal AI research at Thomson Reuters. The lab has offices in Munich and Tübingen.
Point Nine led an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round with backing from leading AI researchers and founders, including Jeff Dean, Chris Ré, Ion Stoica, and Harvey co-founders Gabe Pereyra and Winston Weinberg.
About the role
You are a skilled lawyer ideally with experience on building legal AI software eager to shape the technological future of your field. As a Founding Legal Engineer, you impact how we scope, build, and evaluate AI systems for complex legal work, and how these systems enter legal practice.
Working directly with Grubel’s founding team, you will shape our research, development, and product: Translate complex legal processes into agentic workflows, evaluate our systems for legal soundness and utility, and work with customers to set our product and engineering standards. You need not write code, but you’re passionate about understanding our technology deeply. Working in a fast-moving team at the intersection of AI research, legal practice, and technology excites you.
What you’ll work on
Designing realistic tasks, datasets, and evaluation rubrics for training and evaluation of our legal AI systems
Translating complex legal processes into agentic workflows together with our researchers and engineers
Evaluating system outputs for legal accuracy, usefulness, and failure modes
Leading enterprise pilots and implementations
Supporting customer discovery, demonstrations, and go-to-market initiatives
You may be a good fit if
You have law degree and strong academic record
You have experience practicing law-whether at a law firm, in-house, or in another legal setting
You are proactive, self-directed, and comfortable taking broad ownership at an early-stage company
You are curious about how AI systems work and comfortable working closely with researchers and engineers
Logistics
Munich or Tübingen. We value working together in person, prefer candidates based near one of our offices, and expect at least one day per week in the office. We plan to establish a Zurich office in 2027.
Full time employment
Competitive salary plus a stock option grant in Grubel, Inc., our US parent company.