We’re building a world-class team to redefine knowledge work with AI

Zeno is a legal AI startup building a platform that helps lawyers research, review, and draft documents with real legal reasoning — not just text prediction. We’re developing technology that can:

• Search and retrieve statutes, case law, and commentary with high precision.
• Reason step-by-step, applying legal tests and weighing precedents.
• Explain every answer transparently, so lawyers can trace conclusions back to the exact sources.

Where most tools automate surface-level tasks, we’re focused on replicating the way lawyers actually think through legal problems, making depth and trust the foundation of everything we build.

You’re joining an early-stage startup that is already working with leading firms. Backed with €3M in seed funding, we’re now scaling a team of engineers and thinkers who want to solve real problems, drive innovation, and create lasting change in the legal sector.

The role

As a Data Engineer at Zeno, you'll own the pipelines, tooling, and systems that ingest, transform, and serve legal data across our AI stack. You’ll collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams to build scalable infrastructure that turns raw legal input into structured knowledge, fueling features, insights, and intelligent workflows.

You’ll work closely with our ML, product, and infra teams to build the data backbone for everything from retrieval to generation to knowledge extraction. This role is hands-on, systems-focused, and core to our platform and scaling efforts.

What you’ll work on

• Design and build scalable pipelines to ingest legal data, parse unstructured content, and transformation into data products supporting downstream tasks
• Model legal entities and relationships using graph-based data structures
• Build tooling and pipelines to enrich and validate datasets with metadata, labels, and structure
• Design infrastructure for managing, versioning, and serving structured legal data at scale
• Implement advanced product analytics and benchmarking solutions to support platform quality and feature evaluation
• Partner with research to build labeled datasets and support model evaluation
• Implement data validation, observability, and QA systems for robust operations

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering or backend systems focused on text-heavy or unstructured data
• Very strong programming skills in Python or related languages
• Experience in scraping web data at scale
• Familiarity with vector databases, embedding models, and retrieval pipelines
• Understanding of graph databases (e.g. Neo4j) or graph-structured data modeling
• Solid command of cloud storage, data orchestration (e.g. Dagster, Airflow), and SQL-based analytics
• Pragmatic mindset, with a strong sense of data quality and maintainability
• Bonus: exposure to legal, compliance, academic or other high-complexity document domains

The ride from startup to scale-up

Things will break, priorities will shift, and there won’t always be a playbook. You’ll wear multiple hats, ship fast, and learn faster. Some weeks will feel chaotic, some problems will feel bigger than your role. That’s the nature of the ride from startup to scale-up: if you need stability and structure, this won’t fit. But if you thrive on ownership, speed, and building from zero, you’ll love it here.

Why join us

• Be part of a product-driven team reinventing how legal professionals work.
• Join early and shape the foundation of a fast-growing, high-impact startup.
• Work in a place where hierarchy doesn’t matter — only the best ideas do.
• Collaborate with a top-tier team of engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs.
• Competitive compensation, employee benefits and strong upside as we grow.
• An inspiring place to work in the heart of Rotterdam.

Shape the future of legal work with us.