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.

Key skills/competency

• Legal Operations
• Enterprise Architecture
• Applied AI
• CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management)
• OCM (Obligation Compliance Management)
• Workflow Orchestration
• API Integration
• Agentic Workflows
• Python
• SQL