Lead Machine Learning Engineer (Brightflag)

The Opportunity

At Brightflag you will join a team at the forefront of AI in Legal Tech that redefines how legal teams operate every day. Here, we challenge ourselves with ambitious goals, best practice standards and a drive for continuous improvement. 

Brightflag is seeking a specialist Machine Learning (ML) Engineer to bridge the gap between AI innovation and production-ready software. While our Data Scientists excel at application and research, you will be the "Center of Excellence" for deployment, responsible for taking experimental models and hardening them into scalable, high-performance features within the Brightflag app. Making sure that features are delivered and that model output is monitored and maintained over time.

You will have the opportunity to work in a culture that values autonomy and enourages novel and creative solutions to problems - not just the same old model development process. You are passionate about moving projects from Proof of Concept to Production in a scalable repeatable manner.

You are a team player working within the data science team who have over 30 years of experience in shipping AI features, as well as collaborating with our product and engineering teams to implement innovative analytical solutions. You’ll ship a product that delivers  the best value for our customers in line with a clear company strategy with data science innovation as a core pillar of the product. You will be focused on external and internal facing Data Science projects - product facing features to provide insight, value & automation for our customers and models that make our internal processes more efficient and robust.

*This is an individual contributor role and does not involve people management.

What You Will Be Doing

• Production Deployment: Own the transition of models from proof-of-concept (POC) to production-grade code.
• Model Optimization: Iterate on existing models to improve performance, scalability, and efficiency in a production environment.
• Engineering Collaboration: Work with engineering squads to ensure AI features are seamlessly integrated into our cloud infrastructure.
• Generative AI Scaling: Help scale Generative AI applications, utilizing frameworks like LangChain or LlamaIndex and implementing patterns like RAG.
• MLOps and Feature Architecture: Design, implement, and maintain robust pipelines,infrastructure and CI/CD workflows to automate model retraining and deployment.
• Monitoring & Drift: Implement systems for monitoring model performance, data drift, and accuracy to ensure high-quality outputs without manual intervention.

Skills & Experience

To be successful in the role, you need:

• 5+ years of experience with a primary focus on deploying and maintaining ML models in a SaaS product environment
• MSc or equivalent in AI/machine learning
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Experience deploying machine learning systems to the cloud in particular experience working with AWS machine learning stack as well as some familiarity with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins/CircleCI/AWS Codebuild/Bitbucket pipelines/Github actions. Familiarity with AWS CDK or equivalent frameworks is a big plus.
• Strong experience working with docker and containerised environments is a must ; also some bash scripting experience and linux shell knowledge is advantageous. Experience working in a shared code repository with version control using git
• Good familiarity with core machine learning techniques and metrics across classification , regression, clustering.
• Good skills in NLP, foundational representations like TFIDF matrices and topic modelling as well familiarity with Word2vec, Transformers etc... Experience working with text embeddings for data extraction, classification etc..
• Strong familiarity with generative AI text based applications and frameworks, in particular applying generative ai models to product application development. Knowledge of frameworks such as langchain or llamaindex  may be useful but not essential. Similarly familiarity with patterns like RAG would be beneficial but not essential. Knowledge of MCP would be beneficial.
• Comfortable working with ambiguity in a fast-paced product environment
• A passion for building product-focused solutions that solve customer problems
• A track record of shipping product by working collaboratively with product and software engineering teams
• Ability to work autonomously

The following are a bonus!

• Some experience of dashboard tools such as PowerBi/Qlik/Tableau a plus but not necessary

Life @ Brightflag

We’re growing fast and so is the experience we can offer you:

• A huge opportunity to make a real impact, to shape what we do and where we are going.
• The exposure and challenge you need to learn, grow and progress your career in a high growth environment.
• Complex technical and business problems to solve and the trust and autonomy you need to go and solve them.
• A sound, helpful team, in a friendly, values-driven and inclusive environment.
• Competitive salary. 
• 25 days of holidays.
• Comprehensive health insurance, life insurance and long term illness/income protection.
• Fully flexible work location and work patterns so you can balance life at home with life at work - come to the office, work at home… or enjoy a blend of both at your discretion.  

We are a diverse and inclusive bunch of people. We welcome diverse perspectives and people who make every day count and strive for constant improvement. We do not discriminate based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race. 

Location & Eligibility

This role offers a flexible work location across Ireland. Whether that be in the office, remote from anywhere in Ireland, or a mix of office/remote work in Ireland, you choose what works best for your lifestyle. 

There are quarterly team meet ups that all of the team are expected to attend in our Dublin office - a good opportunity to catch up and spend some time working together in person.

Your time is valuable. To help with your application, we advise that regrettably we cannot offer work permit sponsorship/ self sponsorship for this role. 

About Brightflag

Hi, we’re Brightflag, the AI-powered, enterprise legal management platform that helps corporate legal departments operate with greater clarity, efficiency, and control.

Powered by our patented AI, which was developed with over 100,000 hours of legal and engineering expertise, and supported by our best-in-class Customer Success teams, Brightflag enables in-house legal teams to streamline operations, manage matters and spend, and collaborate more effectively with outside counsel.

Today, Brightflag is trusted by leading global organizations and forms part of the Legal & Regulatory division of Wolters Kluwer, a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services. You can learn more about Brightflag here.

Our Interview Practices

To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences, and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we’re getting to know you—not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process.

Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.