Senior Data Scientist

About the role

Our client, a major legal company, is actively looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join their team in Raleigh, NC! *** This begins as a 1 year contract with an opportunity to extend or convert at any time *** Position Summary We are seeking a Data Scientist to develop and evaluate AI solutions for legal content workflows.

What you'll do

• focuses on large language models, natural language processing, and reliable data pipelines.
• Experience with traditional machine learning is a strong plus.
• The successful candidate will collaborate with engineers, product stakeholders, and legal subject matter experts to translate business requirements and editorial feedback into measurable improvements.
• This role requires strong
• Python skills, sound experimental judgment, and the ability to independently investigate issues and deliver working solutions.
• Develop and improve LLM-based workflows for information extraction, classification, legal summarization, and content generation.
• Design and evaluate prompts, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multi-step agent workflows.
• Build reliable data-preparation pipelines, including parsing, transformation, validation, caching, and recovery from interrupted processing.
• Create representative evaluation datasets and conduct controlled experiments, error analysis, and regression testing.
• Work with subject matter experts to assess factual accuracy, completeness, source support, and consistency, and translate feedback into generalizable improvements.
• Diagnose problems across data, retrieval, model behavior, and application logic.
• Balance output quality, latency, and cost when comparing technical approaches.
• Maintain tested, version-controlled code and clear documentation to support reproducibility and team handoffs.

What you'll bring

• Bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 3 years of relevant experience in data science, machine learning, or NLP, including hands-on experience developing LLM-based applications.
• Strong Python programming skills and experience with SQL and structured or semi-structured data, such as JSON and XML.
• Practical experience with prompt design, structured outputs, retrieval, and systematic LLM evaluation.
• Understanding of statistical evaluation, train/validation/test separation, data leakage, and appropriate performance metrics.
• Experience using Git, debugging existing code, and writing automated tests.
• Ability to communicate findings clearly, incorporate feedback, and proactively raise delivery risks.
• Experience with traditional machine learning, including feature engineering, classification, tree-based models, and imbalanced datasets.
• Familiarity with scikit-learn, PyTorch, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience fine-tuning transformer models for classification, information extraction, or sequence labeling.
• Familiarity with AWS, particularly S3 and EC2, and Linux or GPU-based training environments.
• Experience with legal documents, editorial workflows, or other accuracy-sensitive domains.