Data Scientist/ AI Engineer
Salary: DOE
Location: Manchester/Hybrid
Data Scientist/ AI Engineer – Fletchers Solicitor AI
Office Locations: Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bolton, Southport, Newcastle, Reading, Birmingham, Northampton, and Cambridge
Hybrid working available – with the flexibility to work from home and collaborate in-office when needed. We believe we offer our colleagues the best hybrid and flexible working practices, balancing working from home with time collaborating and socialising with colleagues in our modern offices.
The existing AI team is distributed across London, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge, and Bristol, and we typically meet in person once or twice per month in Manchester.
Fletchers Group have a fantastic opportunity to join our growing Team.
We are looking for a Data Scientist / AI Engineer to join our expanding AI team at Fletchers Solicitors. This position is meant to sit between pure data and modelling expertise and delivery-oriented development, hence the two job titles: we are keen to adjust the title to either of these depending on your affinities and interests.
This role sits within a fast‑paced, high‑autonomy environment where we are rapidly prototyping, iterating, and deploying state‑of‑the‑art AI products for use across Fletchers and the wider legal sector. The team operates as a start‑up‑style unit within the wider business, reporting directly to the executive team, with a clear mandate to move quickly from idea to production.
You will be responsible for building and owning the AI‑powered features and pipelines at the core of our product portfolio: understanding the data domain and extracting key insight, designing, iterating, and shipping agentic LLM systems that process complex legal and medical documents, surface insights for legal professionals, and increasingly operate autonomously at scale. We have ambitious plans to grow the AI team significantly over the next few years as we expand our internal capabilities and commercialise our technology externally.
The role:
As a Data Scientist / AI Engineer within the AI team, you will take end‑to‑end ownership of the LLM‑powered features and agentic pipelines that form the core of our products. You will move fluidly between scoping a new capability with product stakeholders, iterating rapidly with a prototype, and hardening that prototype into a production‑grade system that handles real legal cases with real consequences. This is a delivery role interfacing with software engineers and product stakeholders, leveraging technical knowledge and analytical capabilities to translate business requirements into scalable AI solutions.
This is a role suited to someone who is equally comfortable reading a codebase and reading a room: technically rigorous enough to architect and ship reliable AI systems in Python, and sharp enough to understand what problem you’re actually solving and what success looks like. You will work closely with, backend engineers, product stakeholders, and frontend developers across multiple projects.
We are open to candidates ranging from mid to senior level. The scope of responsibilities can flex depending on experience and interests, with clear opportunities for rapid progression and significant professional growth for motivated candidates as the team and product portfolio grow.
In return Fletchers offers:
1. 35 hours working week
2. Bonus scheme (subject to targets being met)
3. 35 days holiday a year including bank holidays and Christmas Closure, you also have an option to purchase up to 3 extra days’ holiday per year, until you long service award the 3 days after your 5th, 7th, and 9th full year of employment
4. Pension scheme with tax-efficient salary sacrifice option
5. Life Assurance Policy
6. Medicash policy to cover some dental, optical and other medical expenses
7. Company sick pay
8. Enhanced Maternity, Paternity and IVF schemes
9. Flexible, agile working environment with a positive work-life balance
10. Varied calendar of funded company social events (check out Fletchers Group on LinkedIn)
11. Monthly voucher awards for winning nominees
12. A genuinely supportive and friendly culture
13. Ongoing training and professional development opportunities
Main Responsibilities:
14. Take end‑to‑end ownership of AI features from problem definition through prototype to production deployment, including prompt engineering, orchestration logic, evaluation, and monitoring
15. Design and build agentic LLM pipelines that process complex legal and medical documents. Extracting structured information, summarising case records, identifying key evidence, and surfacing insights for legal professionals
16. Develop and maintain robust evaluation frameworks to measure pipeline quality, catch regressions, and drive iterative improvement
17. Collaborate directly with product stakeholders and legal domain experts to scope requirements, identify where AI genuinely adds value, and translate domain knowledge into well‑designed system behaviour
18. Contribute to the team’s shared Python codebase with high‑quality, maintainable code, taking part in code reviewing, writing tests, and helping establish best practices for LLM‑based systems
19. Work with backend and infrastructure engineers to support data integration from diverse sources, including case management systems, unstructured documents (Word, PDF), and SQL databases
20. Operate effectively in a production environment where deployed systems handle real legal cases: taking quality, reliability, and failure modes seriously to maintain secure data handling
21. Stay close to the fast‑moving AI landscape, identifying new techniques, models, and tools with genuine relevance to our work, and bringing those back into the team
You may be a good fit if you have:
22. Strong proficiency in Python, with hands‑on experience building LLM‑powered features or agentic systems in a production environment: you have shipped AI to real users, not just built demos
23. Practical experience with LLM orchestration patterns e.g. context management, tool use, prompt engineering, RAG, multi‑step agent design, structured output
24. A delivery‑oriented mindset: you take ownership of outcomes, not just tasks, and are comfortable driving work from ambiguous problem statement to shipped feature with minimal supervision
25. Aware of and actively using common software development tools to support code shipping: CI/CD pipelines, workflows, test frameworks, pre-commit/push hooks…
26. Ability to work effectively with non‑technical stakeholders, translating between domain requirements and technical design, and communicating clearly about what AI can and cannot do
27. Based in the UK, with the ability to attend in‑person team meetings approximately once per month
28. Fluency in English
Strong candidates may also have:
29. Familiarity with our core stack: PydanticAI, Azure OpenAI, and Azure infrastructure (Container Apps, Azure AI Foundry, Azure Document Intelligence)
30. Experience in a software engineering, data science, or applied ML role
31. Experience designing and implementing evaluation frameworks for LLM‑based systems
32. Exposure to document processing pipelines: OCR, document parsing, structured information extraction from unstructured legal or medical text
33. Start‑up or greenfield experience, particularly building AI features or data pipelines from scratch in a fast‑moving environment
34. Experience with observability and monitoring for AI systems (e.g. Logfire, Datadog, or similar)
35. Previous experience in a regulated or high‑stakes domain such as legal, medical, financial services, where output quality and auditability matter
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. We mean it when we say strong candidates don’t need to tick every box. Job descriptions are wish lists, not checklists. If the work excites you and you have most of what we’re looking for, we’d rather see your application than have you talk yourself out of it. The people who build the best AI teams are rarely the ones who looked perfect on paper; they’re the ones who were curious, honest about what they didn’t know, and hungry to learn. If that sounds like you, apply.
We want to grow quickly, so reserve the right to close this role early depending on candidate quality and volume.
About Fletchers Solicitors & the AI/Data team
Fletchers is a fast-growing, dynamic law firm specialising in personal injury and clinical negligence law, with outstanding rankings in both The Legal 500 and Chambers & Partners. Following several strategic acquisitions, we’ve evolved into the Fletchers Group, with ambitious plans for continued growth and innovation. Fletchers was one of the first consumer law firms to deploy a machine learning tool for legal work (a decision support system for screening incoming cases, launched in 2017) and was one of, or the first, law firm to have a dedicated AI department, which started in August 2023. Since then, we have been experimenting with a broader range of ML techniques, extending those tools already in use, and productionising new ones through our growing data science & engineering teams.We aspire to be the best place to work in the legal sector.
Our workplace culture is inclusive, informal, and supportive, with a strong focus on colleague wellbeing and happiness. We are proud to offer some of the best hybrid and flexible working arrangements in the industry — because we understand that balance drives performance.
We believe that we are well positioned to leverage Fletchers’ unique legal‑medical dataset and industry expertise to build AI tools that will shape the future of consumer law. We are well funded through our Private Equity backers, which allows us to invest heavily in the development of sector‑specific AI tools that assist, automate, and augment our specialist legal work. Tools we have built range from simple behind‑the‑scenes custom model inference to agentic‑AI pipelines for ‘always on’ monitoring, to the core user interface that some of our colleagues work on for 90%+ of their day. We’re also commercialising these tools so that other specialist law firms can leverage Fletchers’ legal and AI expertise and have an ambitious agenda for external growth for the next 18 months.
We reward those who help build our success and live our values. Our benefits package is designed to grow with you, offering real opportunities to share in our long-term strength. Our base pay and bonus structure is built to recognise and reward high performance.
Join us and be part of a law firm that’s not only growing but redefining what it means to work in legal services.
Fletchers Group is an inclusive employer with a diverse workforce: we welcome applications from any and all backgrounds. We’re committed to providing a culture and environment where everyone can thrive, understanding and celebrating that no colleague is the same. We’re proud of our work on the Disability Confident scheme, signed up to BITC’s Race at Work charter, and working towards Henpicked’s Menopause and Menstrual Friendly accreditations.
36. Location: Manchester/Hybrid
37. Salary: DOE
38. Department: AI
39. Closing Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2026