Senior AI Developer

Stikeman Elliott LLP

• $125K — $175K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in production software design and delivery
  • 1+ year working directly with LLM-powered or agentic applications
  • Proven ownership of applications from architecture to support
  • Experience in a small, hands-on development environment
  • Mentoring junior developers and conducting formal code reviews
  • Expert proficiency in Python and modern web frameworks like FastAPI
  • Production experience with agentic AI and modern agent frameworks

Responsibilities

  • Own application architecture and component interfaces
  • Build agent-facing capabilities as portable tool servers
  • Develop production applications using the Claude Agent SDK
  • Take prototypes to production ensuring reliability and security
  • Serve as senior technical escalation point for AI applications
  • Build integrations with core systems like CRM and document management
  • Establish engineering standards and lead code reviews

Benefits

  • Opportunity for technical leadership and mentoring
  • Hands-on experience with cutting-edge AI technologies
  • Focus on creating solutions that impact legal and business workflows
  • Work in a small team environment, enhancing collaboration
  • Possibility to influence engineering standards and practices
Full Job Description
The Senior AI Software Developer will design, build, and deliver the firm's AI applications, including production agentic systems using the Claude Agent SDK, MCP tool servers that connect AI agents to the firm's systems of record, and reusable plugins and skills for legal and business workflows. This senior, hands-on role spans application architecture, development and production delivery, with responsibility for technical leadership and mentoring within the team.

Key Responsibilities

Application Architecture & Design

  • Own application architecture, including service decomposition, data persistence, state and concurrency models, failure handling, and component interfaces.
  • Build agent-facing capabilities as portable tool servers.


Agentic AI Development

  • Build production applications using the Claude Agent SDK, including sub-agent delegation, skills, plugins, memory, scheduled and headless execution, and context engineering.
  • Develop and maintain MCP servers and tool sets, including structured outputs, HTTP transport, and OAuth.
  • Extend reusable plugins and skills that standardize the firm's legal and business workflows.
  • Design human-in-the-loop controls for high-risk agentic actions.


Prototyping, Delivery & Support

  • Rapidly translate requirements into working MVPs for user feedback and iteration.
  • Take prototypes through to production, ensuring reliability, scalability, observability, documentation, and security.
  • Serve as the senior technical escalation point for AI applications.


Integration, Identity & Security

  • Build integrations with the firm's core systems, including document and email management, practice and matter management, time and billing, CRM, enterprise data platforms, and Microsoft Graph.
  • Implement secure identity and access patterns, including OBO flows and managed identities, to appropriately constrain agent access.
  • Address complex integration requirements, including authentication, session persistence, certificate trust, pagination, rate limits, and idempotency.


Engineering Standards, Code Review & Mentoring

  • Establish engineering standards across AI repositories, including repository structure, branching, releases, code review, CI gates, environment promotion, and secrets management.
  • Lead code reviews for AI applications and plugin contributions, while mentoring developers on engineering practices.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and strengthen the software supply chain in collaboration with Information Security through automated testing, code quality controls, security scanning, dependency management, and secure application credentials.


Experience Requirements

  • Minimum of five years of experience designing and delivering production software, including at least one year working directly with LLM-powered or agentic applications in production.
  • Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of production applications, from architecture and development through deployment and ongoing support.
  • Proven ability to take solutions from prototype to production and make sound decisions about technical viability.
  • Experience working as a senior technical contributor in a small, hands-on development environment.
  • Experience mentoring developers and conducting formal code reviews.


Qualifications

  • Expert proficiency in Python, including asynchronous development, testing, and modern web frameworks such as FastAPI; working knowledge of TypeScript, Node.js, and front-end development.
  • Production experience with agentic AI, including modern agent frameworks, tool calling, orchestration, prompt and context engineering, and MCP servers.
  • Strong understanding of LLM security and retrieval, including prompt-injection and tool-misuse protections, least-privilege access, data isolation, vector search, embeddings and RAG.
  • Experience designing production applications and integrations using REST APIs, OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect, SQL, vector stores, object storage and distributed caching.
  • Strong experience developing cloud applications on Microsoft Azure, including containers, Entra ID, managed identities, Key Vault, managed databases and API Management.
  • Advanced knowledge of GitHub and CI/CD, including code review, Actions, environments, secrets, testing and security controls.
  • Experience with production observability and AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot or equivalent.
  • Strong technical documentation and communication skills.


Salary Range (Toronto Only):

$125,000 - $175,000 annually. The posted salary range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Final offers are determined based on relevant skills, qualifications, and experience.

The position is for an existing vacancy.

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