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Legora is an AI-native legal workspace serving 1,000+ customers across 50+ countries, including top-tier law firms (Cleary Gottlieb, Goodwin, Linklaters, White & Case, Dentons) and enterprises like Barclays. The company has scaled to $100M+ ARR with teams across Europe, North America, and APAC.
As Director of Legal Engineering for the Middle East, you will establish and lead the Legal Engineering function from Dubai, transforming the region from remote coverage into a fully localized operation. This is a senior leadership role combining legal practice expertise, product fluency, enterprise change management, and commercial judgment.
Your primary accountability is building and scaling a high-performing team and operating system. Approximately 75% of your time is spent on people leadership, team development, hiring, quality standards, and career management. The remaining 25% involves direct client work on strategic engagements and setting the delivery bar.
Key responsibilities include:
- Establishing the Legal Engineering operating model for the Middle East, including staffing, quality standards, and local partnerships with Go-to-Market and Engagement teams
- Hiring exceptional Legal Engineers and developing a manager layer of Team Leads with real decision rights and succession planning
- Owning career management: setting expectations, providing feedback, calibration, and promotion readiness
- Partnering with regional commercial leadership on priority accounts, pilots, and enterprise rollouts
- Acting as lead legal architect on selected complex engagements, translating legal problems into Legora workflows and building reusable playbooks
- Holding governance and quality standards on multi-stakeholder programmes through clear ownership and risk review
- Building trusted relationships with managing partners, general counsels, and senior stakeholders across the Gulf
- Representing the region internally, translating client patterns, Arabic-language needs, and local content gaps into product input
- Shaping Legora's market positioning on AI and legal work through executive forums, events, and thought leadership
- Creating clean handoffs across commercial, delivery, and engagement functions to reinforce momentum and adoption
The Middle East market spans federal UAE law, emirate-level systems, DIFC and ADGM common-law free zones, and Saudi Arabia as a longer-term opportunity. You will need credibility across international firms, leading regional firms, and large in-house teams at corporates and sovereign-linked entities.
Success at this level requires: deep product knowledge and ability to move quickly from complex legal problems to credible workflows; clear communication translating legal and technical complexity into business outcomes; strong programme judgment to inspect delivery plans and identify risk; sophisticated stakeholder management across competing interests; and thought leadership grounded in first-hand experience.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Substantial experience with sophisticated legal work in the Gulf, with clear understanding of how international firms, leading regional firms, and large in-house teams make decisions
- Legal qualification required; jurisdiction matters less than credibility with senior legal buyers in the region
- Proven track record building a team, function, market, or new operating model from a low base, with clear evidence of personal decisions and sustainable outcomes
- Experience managing and developing strong people, ideally including managers or team leads, with demonstrated career acceleration of direct reports
- Ability to run career management properly: set expectations, calibrate fairly, assess readiness, and act decisively
- Deep curiosity about generative AI and product; ability to learn the platform, challenge use-case design, and coach credible client work (software engineering background not required)
- Ability to hold your own with managing partners and general counsels while remaining practical with execution teams
- Understanding of commercial realities in legal services and enterprise software; ability to connect delivery to pipeline, client value, adoption, usage, and revenue
- Ability to bring structure to ambiguity without creating unnecessary process; proven ability to build operating systems that improve speed and quality
- Comfort with practical market-build realities: hiring in competitive talent markets, working across regional jurisdictions, regular travel
- Fluent English; Arabic strongly preferred and materially useful
- Based in Dubai, able to work from office five days per week with regular travel across UAE and wider region
