Senior Legal Solutions Architect

About the Role

We are hiring a Senior Legal Solutions Architect to design, build, and scale the AI-native systems that power OpenAI’s Legal function. This role sits at the intersection of legal operations, enterprise architecture, business intelligence, and applied AI, and is responsible for architecting workflows that combine traditional legal systems (CLM, OCM, case management, intake) with agentic, model-driven automation using OpenAI’s API and agent builder platform.

Reporting to the Head of Legal Operations, you will lead the technical design of Legal’s systems and workflows in close collaboration with Legal Operations program managers —owning integrations, orchestration, and agentic workflows that enable Legal to operate at OpenAI’s speed and scale, while maintaining rigor around security, privilege, reliability, and governance.

This is a hands-on architecture and build role, with a strong emphasis on building scalable solutions for Legal through configuring, integrating, and extending legal and internal technology and platforms.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

AI-Native & Agentic Workflow Design

• Design and implement agentic legal workflows incorporating multi-step reasoning, tool-calling, orchestration, and human-in-the-loop review using OpenAI models and APIs.

• Build systems where agents can:

  • Triage and route legal intake.

  • Extract, normalize, and reason over contract, matter, and billing data.

  • Apply playbooks, flag deviations, and escalate issues.

  • Interact with downstream systems and data platforms in a controlled, auditable way.

• Define guardrails around autonomy, review thresholds, and escalation paths.

Legal Systems & Data Architecture

• Serve as the primary architect and steward of the legal technology stack, including:

  • CLM, OCM, and intake systems.

  • Workflow orchestration and middleware.

  • AI/agent services using OpenAI models, APIs, and agent builder platforms

  • Data platforms.

• Design data flows that ensure legal data is:

  • Structured and queryable.

  • Governed for privilege and access.

  • Suitable for analytics and AI-driven workflows.

Legal Analytics Enablement

• Design and oversee data flows that ensure legal data (contracts, matters, requests, invoices, workflow events) from core systems is structured, reportable, and ready for analytics and AI use cases.

• Support AI and agentic use cases that rely on curated datasets, embeddings, and historical context.

• Ensure data quality, lineage, and auditability across systems.

Integrations, APIs & Middleware

• Configure, extend, support, and in some cases build API-based integrations, webhooks and middleware connectors across legal systems, data platforms, and enterprise tools.

You’ll enjoy this role if you:

• 7+ years of experience in legal engineering, solutions architecture, or complex enterprise systems integration.

• Strong hands-on experience with API integration and middleware (REST APIs, JSON, webhooks, auth, error handling, observability).

• Comfort with light scripting or automation (e.g., Python, SQL, or similar) for building automation, integrations, and backend services.

• Deep experience with CLM systems in a complex legal environment.

• Experience designing and scaling workflows using tools like Tonkean or comparable orchestration platforms.

• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous legal requirements into reliable technical systems.

• Strong systems thinking around reliability, security, permissions, and data integrity.

• Hands-on experience building with OpenAI APIs (or similar LLM platforms), including tool-calling and multi-step workflows.

• Experience designing agentic systems with human-in-the-loop review and safety constraints.

• Experience integrating legal systems with ticketing, orchestration, and data/BI platforms.

• Strong technical documentation and architectural communication skills.

What Success Looks Like:

• Legal workflows are faster, more scalable, and more resilient through a mix of automation, agents, and human review.

• AI-powered systems are deployed responsibly, with clear guardrails and measurable impact.

• Legal data is structured, usable, and trusted across systems.

• The legal tech stack has a clear, extensible architecture that supports rapid iteration.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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