Director of Legal Engineering, Dubai

ABOUT US Legora is redefining how legal work gets done. Not built for lawyers, built with them. We work alongside the world’s best legal teams, who expect excellence, precision, and speed, and we hold ourselves to the same bar. Our AI-native workspace lets legal professionals move faster, think more clearly, and operate with sharper precision. By analysing thousands of documents in minutes and powering end-to-end workflows, we cut through complexity, teams can focus on what matters: judgment, strategy, and outcomes. 1,000+ customers across 50+ countries trust us, including Cleary Gottlieb, Goodwin, Linklaters, White & Case, Dentons, and Barclays. We’ve scaled to $100M+ in ARR, with teams across Europe, North America and APAC, and continue to expand through acquisitions including Qura, Walter AI and Graceview. We partner with world-class performers: including Aaron Judge and the New York Yankees, Ludvig Åberg (and his caddie), and campaigns featuring Jude Law. Joining Legora means three things. - We lean in: ownership over titles, outcomes over intentions. - We fight for excellence: high standards, direct, ego-free feedback. - We grow together: as a team and with our customers. Mission before ego. Everyone contributes. No one coasts. If you’re driven by impact, pace, and raising the bar. This is the place. ABOUT THE ROLE Let's get the tricky part out of the way. Legal Engineering does not fit neatly into a traditional box. It combines legal practice, product fluency, enterprise change, commercial judgement and client leadership. As Director of Legal Engineering, Dubai, your mission is to establish Legal Engineering as the commercial and delivery engine for the Middle East, anchored in Dubai. The region is currently served from our European hubs, alongside an installed base that already includes some of the most significant firms and in-house teams in the Gulf. Your job is to turn that into a local function: the craft bar, the team, the manager layer and the operating system that keeps it connected to Legora globally. This is a senior leadership role with a real management mandate. Your primary output is the quality, performance and independence of the team and system you build. Around a quarter of your time stays in direct client work, enough to set and inspect the bar and to lead personally where the stakes justify it. You will not project-manage every engagement. Senior Legal Engineers and programme leads own delivery. You own the people, the staffing model, the quality bar and the outcome in aggregate. The Middle East is its own market, not a variant of Europe. The enterprise opportunity sits with international firms, leading regional firms and in-house teams at large corporates and sovereign-linked entities. The legal landscape spans federal law, emirate-level systems and the common-law free zones of DIFC and ADGM, with Saudi Arabia as the larger long-term opportunity. Arabic capability and a credible answer on data protection and local hosting are the price of entry here. You will need to hold your own on all of it. You will have the autonomy to shape how Legal Engineering lands in a strategically important region, together with the responsibility to keep that local model connected to Legora's global standards. WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING Some of what you will be up to: - Stand up the Legal Engineering function for the Middle East from the Dubai office, including its operating rhythm, quality bar, capacity and staffing model, and the local partnership with Go-to-Market and Engagement. - Hire exceptional Legal Engineers and future leaders. Own the bar from sourcing and interview calibration through closing, onboarding and ramp, and build Arabic-capable coverage deliberately rather than opportunistically. - Build a manager layer of Team Leads who each own and develop a group of Legal Engineers. Delegate real decision rights and create clear succession so the function becomes stronger and less dependent on you over time. - Own career management for the hub: expectations, early feedback, calibration, promotion readiness and succession. Use staffing decisions to create deliberate development, not only to fill a request. - Give direct, evidence-based feedback. Coach hard, set clear expectations and act decisively when the performance or values bar is not met. - Partner with regional commercial leadership on priority accounts, pilots, rollouts and escalations. Connect Legal Engineering activity to conversion, adoption, usage, expansion and revenue. - Act as the lead legal architect on selected enterprise engagements, especially first-of-a-kind work in the region. Translate a real legal problem into a concrete Legora workflow, then turn successful delivery into a reusable playbook. - Hold the standard on complex, multi-stakeholder programmes through governance, named owners, leading indicators and risk review, rather than by taking the work back. - Build trusted relationships with managing partners, general counsels, heads of innovation, legal operations leaders and other senior stakeholders across the Gulf. - Represent the region inside Legora. Turn recurring client patterns, Arabic-language needs, local content gaps and hosting requirements into clear, actionable input for Product. - Shape Legora's point of view on AI and legal work in the region. Contribute through executive client forums, events, writing and practical market insight grounded in first-hand work. - Create clean handoffs across Go-to-Market, Legal Engineering and Engagement so that commercial momentum, delivery quality and long-term adoption reinforce one another. WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE At this level, strong performance looks like this: - Product knowledge and application. Move quickly from complex legal problems to credible Legora workflows, including in Arabic and across local jurisdictions. Set the quality bar, coach others to meet it and turn the strongest work into reusable offers, templates and playbooks. - Communication. Translate legal and technical complexity into business outcomes. Build trust with senior leaders, write clearly and help the team develop the same executive presence. - Programme judgment. Inspect a delivery plan at a moment's notice, find the risk, set a high bar and coach the person leading it. Keep outcomes, owners, dependencies, metrics and governance visible, and codify what the organisation should reuse. - Stakeholder management. Understand the incentives beneath competing positions, resolve high-stakes escalations and coach Legal Engineers to own senior relationships rather than holding them all yourself. - Thought leadership. Develop a credible point of view on how AI will change legal work in the region, grounded in first-hand experience. Shape the local market conversation and turn field insight into useful product and company direction. WHAT YOU BRING You may come from a leading law firm, an in-house legal function, legal operations, legal innovation, professional services, legal technology, or a combination of those worlds. The common thread is that you have moved beyond advising on change and have built the people, systems and client outcomes that make change real. You will thrive in this role if you: - Bring substantial experience of sophisticated legal work in the Gulf, with a clear understanding of how international firms, leading regional firms and large in-house teams make decisions. A legal qualification is expected; the jurisdiction matters less than credibility with senior legal buyers in this region. - Have built a team, function, market or new operating model from a low base, with clear evidence of what you personally decided and what continued to work without you. - Have managed and developed strong people, ideally including managers or team leads, and can point to people whose careers accelerated under your leadership. - Can run career management properly: set expectations, calibrate fairly, assess readiness for the next step and act early when the evidence is not changing. - Are deeply curious about generative AI and product. You do not need to be a software engineer, but you must be able to learn the platform, challenge use-case design and coach credible client work. - Can hold your own with a managing partner, general counsel or executive team while remaining practical with the people doing the work. - Understand the commercial realities of legal services and enterprise software. You can connect Legal Engineering to pipeline, client value, adoption, usage and revenue. - Bring structure to ambiguity without creating process for its own sake. You build operating systems that improve speed and quality. - Are comfortable with the practical realities of a market build, including hiring in a competitive talent market, working across the region's jurisdictions and travelling regularly. - Communicate fluently in English. Arabic is strongly preferred and materially useful in this market. - Are based in Dubai and able to work from the office five days per week, with travel across the UAE and the wider region for strategic clients, market development and team leadership. A FEW MORE THINGS Legora is growing quickly, and the Middle East is a build. You will not inherit a finished local system. You will inherit real customer proof in the region, partnerships worth building on, and the useful mess that comes with early scale: coverage stretched across time zones, demand ahead of local capacity, and a manager layer that does not exist yet. The right person will enjoy that combination. Credible with a managing partner, practical with the team doing the work, and disciplined enough to turn strong individual execution into a system that outlasts them. If that sounds exciting rather than terrifying, we would like to hear from you. Legora is an Equal Opportunity Employer At Legora, we believe great teams are built on diversity of thought and experience. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and committed to creating an inclusive, high-performance culture where everyone can do their best work. We welcome people of all backgrounds and don’t discriminate based on race, color, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.