ML Research Engineer - Legal Reasoning
Remote
Development
About the Company
Adalat AI is a legal-tech startup revolutionizing the Indian judicial system through advanced artificial intelligence solutions, by building an end-to-end justice tech stack. Operating across 10 Indian states and supported by some of the world's largest foundations, we're dedicated to eliminating judicial delays and enhancing access to justice through innovative technology.
Our solutions, including state-of-the-art ASR models for Indian languages, have been successfully implemented in multiple high courts, with our recent launch at the Delhi High Court marking a significant milestone. Founded by a team combining expertise in law, technology, and computational linguistics, with credentials from Harvard, Oxford, MIT, and IIIT Hyderabad, Adalat AI has earned recognition through prestigious competitions and partnerships, demonstrating our commitment to bringing India's courts into the digital age alongside other modernized systems like UPI, Aadhaar, and online taxation.
Role Overview
The Justice Lab & Tax-Litigation Co-Pilot
You’ll join The Justice Lab—our skunk-works unit focused on ideas six-to-twelve months ahead of production.
Flagship project: a Tax-Litigation Co-Pilot that ingests full judgments, statutes, and filings, then produces defensible predictions and transparent explanations.
Principal Investigator: Utkarsh Saxena (CEO, Adalat AI)
Project Oversight: Prof. Daron Acemoglu (MIT) & Prof. Daniel Kang (UIUC)
Day-to-Day Mentor: Arghya Bhattacharya (CTO, Adalat AI)
Role in a Nutshell
As a Research Engineer—Legal Reasoning you will turn cutting-edge ideas into artifacts that ship:
Frame the problem: formalize “legal reasoning” for outcome prediction.
Design experiments: benchmark LLMs on labeled tax-law and civil-procedure tasks.
Prototype systems: retrieval-augmented generation, evidence tracing, causal inference—pipelines that think like lawyers.
Build eval suites: factual consistency, citation faithfulness, policy impact (e.g., case-load reduction).
Ship hand-offables: lightweight services or notebooks that engineers can harden.
Publish: co-author internal memos and external papers with academic partners.
Key Responsibilities
Data & Evaluation
Curate, label, and version corpora spanning four court tiers.
Create task sets for prediction, entailment, and explanation.
Modeling & Experimentation
Fine-tune / distill LLMs with RL-, DPO-, or SFT-style feedback.
Explore long-context and retrieval strategies (LoRA, RAG, chunking).
Legal-Reasoning Research
Model precedential hierarchies, detect conflicts, and generate citation-grounded chains of thought.
Collaboration
Sync daily on design and code quality.
Present findings to Professors Acemoglu, Kang, and policy advisors.
Documentation & Dissemination
Maintain reproducible logs, polished reports, and publish-ready code.
Qualifications
Must-Have | Nice-to-Have |
|---|---|
2 + years NLP/ML research (industry or grad school) | Prior work on legal or policy datasets |
Fluency in PyTorch/JAX & modern LLM fine-tuning stacks | Publications at ACL, ICML, NeurIPS, etc. |
Skill in large-corpus wrangling & eval pipeline building | Causal-inference or decision-theoretic ML |
Clear, concise technical writing & comms | Familiarity with Indian tax or civil-procedure law |
No one ticks every box—if the mission resonates, let’s talk.
What You Will Achieve in a Year
A prototype that classifies appeal merit with ≥ 75 % F1 on held-out High-Court cases.
An evaluation methodology poised to become the standard for legal-AI outcome prediction in the Global South.
A first-author or co-author paper submission (e.g., NeurIPS L4DC, ICML LawML).
Pilot deployment inside real-world Tax Offices.
Benefits and Perks
WFH with flexible work hours.
Unlimited PTO
Autonomy and Ownership
Learning & Development resources
Smart, Humble and Friendly peers
Generous vacation
Maternity and Paternity leaves
Contacts within the Harvard / MIT/ Oxford ecosystem
Join Our Team
To apply, please send your resume and a cover letter with the subject line: "ML Research Engineer - Legal Reasoning".