AI Developer Jobs in Illinois
AI Developer jobs in Illinois are among the most active in the Midwest, with demand concentrated in enterprise software, financial technology, and healthcare AI at levels from entry-level engineer through principal and staff roles. Chicago leads hiring by a wide margin, with significant activity in Champaign-Urbana and Naperville, where established employers like Allstate, Morningstar, and Tempus have built lasting AI practices. The most sought-after specialties include large language model integration, ML Ops pipeline engineering, and computer vision applied to insurance, trading, and clinical diagnostics. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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About Kirkland & Ellis
At Kirkland & Ellis, we don’t just meet the standard for legal excellence — we set it. Our culture is built on teamwork, ingenuity and an unwavering commitment to continuous growth. We tackle the most sophisticated legal challenges with bold ideas and innovative solutions, powered by the exceptional experience and ambition of our 7,000+ people, including 4,000+ attorneys, across 24 offices worldwide. Our dedicated professionals share our lawyers’ commitment to excellence and show up each day to do meaningful work that helps drive global business, investment and innovation forward.
What You’ll Do
Do you want to apply advanced artificial intelligence engineering to transform how a leading law firm serves clients and operates its business?
As an Innovation Lead AI Developer, you’ll join Innovation Engineering to build intelligent products and data-driven solutions that improve quality, speed, and decision-making across legal work and firm operations. This firm-wide role reports to Innovation Engineering leadership and owns the technical direction, architecture, and delivery quality of a workstream or product family within the artificial intelligence portfolio.
You’ll remain hands-on with complex technical work while guiding assigned engineers, partnering with attorneys and business leaders, and establishing secure, scalable foundations in fast-moving or newly built environments. This is a lead individual contributor position with no formal direct reports and occasional travel. The schedule for this position is: Monday through Friday from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm, with hours that may vary.
- Define and document architecture, platform choices, system boundaries, integration patterns, and engineering standards for an assigned workstream or product family.
- Stay substantially hands-on by developing the highest-risk or most novel components and creating reusable templates, libraries, evaluation tools, and deployment patterns.
- Review designs, sequence engineers’ work, remove technical blockers, and serve as the escalation point for complex architecture and design decisions.
- Translate ambiguous legal and business needs into clear technical plans with measurable outcomes, milestones, and success criteria.
- Oversee evaluation results, security, monitoring, maintainability, incident response, documentation, and the overall health of production solutions.
- Lead build-versus-adopt assessments and conduct technical diligence on vendor platforms and third-party tools.
- Lead discovery and roadmap discussions with partners, practice group leaders, business unit heads, embedded teams, and Information Technology (IT), explaining technical choices and trade-offs in clear language.
- Collaborate constructively with external consultants, vendor engineering teams, and forward-deployed engineers to support successful joint delivery.
- Mentor developers at multiple career levels, provide input on their growth, and contribute reusable insights to shared standards, playbooks, and training.
What You’ll Bring
- Education: A bachelor’s degree.
- At least nine years of experience delivering software or artificial intelligence solutions in professional services, legal, or technical environments, including success setting technical direction for a team or product area.
- Advanced Python skills and deep production experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, agentic workflows, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, and knowledge-graph-backed solutions.
- Experience designing and operating Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation frameworks in production and using results to inform architecture and product decisions.
- Experience with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), monitoring and observability, secure deployment, and performance at scale using Microsoft Azure or a comparable cloud platform.
- A record of establishing standards, infrastructure, and reusable patterns in evolving environments while helping other engineers grow through mentorship and thoughtful review.
- The credibility and communication skills to lead discussions with senior non-technical stakeholders, explain complex topics clearly, and work effectively with vendors and consultants.
- Experience in a law firm, legal technology company, or professional services environment, particularly involving Microsoft Azure, vendor engineering teams, or legal use cases such as due diligence, contract review, and legal research.
If you’re excited to set the technical direction for meaningful artificial intelligence solutions while remaining close to the engineering work, we’d love to hear from you about the Innovation Lead AI Developer opportunity!
Compensation
The base salary range below represents the low and high end of the salary range for this position in Chicago. This range may differ based on your geographic location and cost of living considerations. At Kirkland & Ellis, we consider compensation more than just a base salary. We offer an exceptional range of flexible benefits including comprehensive healthcare, paid time off, and retirement. We also offer personal support and tailored learning and development opportunities all designed to help you realize your full potential both in life and at work.
Compensation Range:
Chicago: $233,000 - $320,000
How to Apply
Thank you for your interest in Kirkland & Ellis LLP. To complete an application and submit your resume, please click "Apply Now."
Don't meet every job requirement? That's okay! If you're excited about this role but your experience doesn't perfectly fit every qualification, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right person for this role or others at Kirkland.
Equal Employment Opportunity
All employment decisions, including the recruiting, hiring, placement, training availability, promotion, compensation, evaluation, disciplinary actions, and termination of employment (if necessary) are made without regard to the employee’s race, color, creed, religion, sex, pregnancy or childbirth, personal appearance, family responsibilities, sexual orientation or preference, gender identity, political affiliation, source of income, place of residence, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military veteran status, unfavorable discharge from military service, physical or mental disability, or on any other basis prohibited by applicable law. #LI-Hybrid #LI-SM1
About Kirkland & Ellis
At Kirkland & Ellis, we don’t just meet the standard for legal excellence — we set it. Our culture is built on teamwork, ingenuity and an unwavering commitment to continuous growth. We tackle the most sophisticated legal challenges with bold ideas and innovative solutions, powered by the exceptional experience and ambition of our 7,000+ people, including 4,000+ attorneys, across 24 offices worldwide. Our dedicated professionals share our lawyers’ commitment to excellence and show up each day to do meaningful work that helps drive global business, investment and innovation forward.
What You’ll Do
Do you want to apply advanced artificial intelligence engineering to transform how a leading law firm serves clients and operates its business?
As an Innovation Lead AI Developer, you’ll join Innovation Engineering to build intelligent products and data-driven solutions that improve quality, speed, and decision-making across legal work and firm operations. This firm-wide role reports to Innovation Engineering leadership and owns the technical direction, architecture, and delivery quality of a workstream or product family within the artificial intelligence portfolio.
You’ll remain hands-on with complex technical work while guiding assigned engineers, partnering with attorneys and business leaders, and establishing secure, scalable foundations in fast-moving or newly built environments. This is a lead individual contributor position with no formal direct reports and occasional travel. The schedule for this position is: Monday through Friday from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm, with hours that may vary.
- Define and document architecture, platform choices, system boundaries, integration patterns, and engineering standards for an assigned workstream or product family.
- Stay substantially hands-on by developing the highest-risk or most novel components and creating reusable templates, libraries, evaluation tools, and deployment patterns.
- Review designs, sequence engineers’ work, remove technical blockers, and serve as the escalation point for complex architecture and design decisions.
- Translate ambiguous legal and business needs into clear technical plans with measurable outcomes, milestones, and success criteria.
- Oversee evaluation results, security, monitoring, maintainability, incident response, documentation, and the overall health of production solutions.
- Lead build-versus-adopt assessments and conduct technical diligence on vendor platforms and third-party tools.
- Lead discovery and roadmap discussions with partners, practice group leaders, business unit heads, embedded teams, and Information Technology (IT), explaining technical choices and trade-offs in clear language.
- Collaborate constructively with external consultants, vendor engineering teams, and forward-deployed engineers to support successful joint delivery.
- Mentor developers at multiple career levels, provide input on their growth, and contribute reusable insights to shared standards, playbooks, and training.
What You’ll Bring
- Education: A bachelor’s degree.
- At least nine years of experience delivering software or artificial intelligence solutions in professional services, legal, or technical environments, including success setting technical direction for a team or product area.
- Advanced Python skills and deep production experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, agentic workflows, orchestration frameworks, vector databases, and knowledge-graph-backed solutions.
- Experience designing and operating Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation frameworks in production and using results to inform architecture and product decisions.
- Experience with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), monitoring and observability, secure deployment, and performance at scale using Microsoft Azure or a comparable cloud platform.
- A record of establishing standards, infrastructure, and reusable patterns in evolving environments while helping other engineers grow through mentorship and thoughtful review.
- The credibility and communication skills to lead discussions with senior non-technical stakeholders, explain complex topics clearly, and work effectively with vendors and consultants.
- Experience in a law firm, legal technology company, or professional services environment, particularly involving Microsoft Azure, vendor engineering teams, or legal use cases such as due diligence, contract review, and legal research.
If you’re excited to set the technical direction for meaningful artificial intelligence solutions while remaining close to the engineering work, we’d love to hear from you about the Innovation Lead AI Developer opportunity!
Compensation
The base salary range below represents the low and high end of the salary range for this position in Chicago. This range may differ based on your geographic location and cost of living considerations. At Kirkland & Ellis, we consider compensation more than just a base salary. We offer an exceptional range of flexible benefits including comprehensive healthcare, paid time off, and retirement. We also offer personal support and tailored learning and development opportunities all designed to help you realize your full potential both in life and at work.
Compensation Range:
Chicago: $233,000 - $320,000
How to Apply
Thank you for your interest in Kirkland & Ellis LLP. To complete an application and submit your resume, please click "Apply Now."
Don't meet every job requirement? That's okay! If you're excited about this role but your experience doesn't perfectly fit every qualification, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right person for this role or others at Kirkland.
Equal Employment Opportunity
All employment decisions, including the recruiting, hiring, placement, training availability, promotion, compensation, evaluation, disciplinary actions, and termination of employment (if necessary) are made without regard to the employee’s race, color, creed, religion, sex, pregnancy or childbirth, personal appearance, family responsibilities, sexual orientation or preference, gender identity, political affiliation, source of income, place of residence, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military veteran status, unfavorable discharge from military service, physical or mental disability, or on any other basis prohibited by applicable law. #LI-Hybrid #LI-SM1
See All 16 AI Developer Jobs in Illinois
Find roles in Illinois that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find AI Developer JobsAI Developer Jobs by City in Illinois
Where Illinois roles are concentrated, by current openings.
AI Developer Job Market in Illinois
A snapshot from current Illinois openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
Top Industries Hiring
- Consulting & Professional Services
What Illinois Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in AI developer jobs across Illinois.
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, AI, or a closely related field
- Proficiency in Python and at least one major ML framework such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
- Experience designing, training, and deploying machine learning models in production environments
- Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud for model hosting and scaling
- Strong understanding of data pipelines, feature engineering, and model evaluation techniques
- Ability to communicate model results and trade-offs clearly to non-technical business stakeholders
AI Developer Jobs in Illinois: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a ai developer in Illinois?
Illinois does not require a state-issued license to work as an ai developer, so the path runs through education and demonstrated skills. Most Illinois employers expect at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, or engineering, and many prefer a master's for research-oriented roles. Building a portfolio of deployed models, contributing to open-source projects, and earning recognized industry certifications in cloud ML services are the credentials that move candidates forward in Illinois hiring pipelines.
How much do AI developers make in Illinois?
AI developers in Illinois earn a median of about $132,110 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $80,980 for the lowest 10% to over $194,740 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire ai developers in Illinois?
Employers hiring ai developers in Illinois right now include Kirkland & Ellis, UST, and Shure, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of September 2026. Illinois's deep concentration of insurance carriers, financial data firms, and health technology companies means demand for ai developers here extends well beyond the tech sector into industries that are actively embedding AI into core products.
Which Illinois cities have the most ai developer jobs?
Chicago, Niles, and Lincolnshire have the most ai developer openings in Illinois. Chicago dominates by volume because it anchors the state's financial technology, enterprise software, and health system industries, while Naperville and Champaign-Urbana contribute meaningfully through corporate technology campuses and University of Illinois research spin-offs that feed a steady stream of AI-focused roles.
Are there remote ai developer jobs in Illinois?
Yes, and more than most fields. About 100% of ai developer openings tied to Illinois are remote or hybrid as of September 2026, reflecting the desk-based and cloud-centric nature of the work. Model development, experimentation, and MLOps engineering are the functions most commonly offered fully remote, while roles requiring close collaboration with proprietary data infrastructure tend to be hybrid or on-site.
How can I get hired as a ai developer in Illinois with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is through a machine learning engineering associate or junior data scientist role at one of Illinois's large financial or insurance employers, which regularly run new-graduate rotational programs. Companies like Allstate and Discover Financial have structured early-career technology tracks where candidates move from analytics support into applied AI work. A strong project portfolio hosted publicly, a completed capstone involving real datasets, or a cloud ML certification gives Illinois candidates a concrete edge over applicants with only coursework on their record.
Where can I find and apply to ai developer jobs in Illinois?
You can find and apply to ai developer jobs in Illinois on Migrate Mate, which lists current Illinois openings updated regularly. Search the available roles, find the ones that match your background and preferences, and apply directly to the employers posting them.
See All 16 AI Developer Jobs in Illinois
Find roles in Illinois that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
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