Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer)

Description

Thomson Reuters products power professionals shaping the world across legal, tax, accounting, and audit. As a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer AI) on Cloud Audit Suite, you will own backend and AI orchestration systems that transform frontier models into reliable, production-grade workflows at scale. You'll also help drive our transition to an AI-native engineering organization where AI accelerates development and engineers provide technical leadership, architecture, and judgment.

About the Role

As a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer), you will be responsible for the architecture and technical direction of Audit Suite. Define AI engineering patterns for MCP servers, agent frameworks, LLM integration, experimentation, and scalable infrastructure. Build systems operating across millions of documents, structured financial data, evolving regulations, and thousands of concurrent AI interactions. Lead across engineering, product, UX, and AI teams to rapidly design and deliver customer-facing solutions. Set technical direction, mentor senior engineers, and stay hands-on in architecture and code. Drive platform integration strategy across Thomson Reuters audit systems.

Thomson Reuters informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. We serve professionals across legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media. Our products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions, and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a world leading provider of trusted journalism and news.

We are powered by the talents of 26,000 employees across more than 70 countries, where everyone has a chance to contribute and grow professionally in flexible work environments. At a time when objectivity, accuracy, fairness, and transparency are under attack, we consider it our duty to pursue them. Sound exciting? Join us and help shape the industries that move society forward.

As a global business, we rely on the unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of all employees to deliver on our business goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. Thomson Reuters is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer providing a drug-free workplace.

Thomson Reuters makes reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities, including veterans with disabilities, and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. If you reside in the United States and require an accommodation in the recruiting process, you may contact our Human Resources Department at HR.Leave-Expert@thomsonreuters.com . Disability accommodations in the recruiting process may include things like a sign language interpreter, making interview rooms accessible, providing assistive technology, or other relevant accommodations. Please note this email is not intended for general recruitment questions and we will promptly respond to inquiries regarding accommodations. More information on requesting an accommodation here.

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More information about Thomson Reuters can be found on thomsonreuters.com

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Cross-Functional Influence
• Lead strategic initiatives spanning AI, platform, and infrastructure.
• Mentor engineers and elevate system design, code quality, and AI engineering practices.
• Partner with AI/ML teams, researchers, designers, and product managers to convert emerging AI capabilities into trusted customer solutions.
• Influence roadmap, technical strategy, experimentation, testing, rollout practices, and operational excellence.
• Design & Own AI-First Backend Systems
• Architect and build backend services using C#/.NET, Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Vercel that power AI-driven workflows and document-centric experiences.
• Develop AI orchestration capabilities including MCP servers, tool calling, workflow routing, guardrails, reliability, and LLM integrations.
• Scale, Reliability & Performance
• Design high-throughput, low-latency AI systems using caching, queuing, rate limiting, failover, and cost optimization strategies.
• Build retrieval and search systems leveraging large document collections, vector databases, and indexing technologies.
• Establish observability, SLOs, and incident management practices for auditable and trustworthy AI systems.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, related field, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in technical leadership roles and 3+ years building scalable cloud applications, APIs, and AI-enabled products.
• Proven track record of shipping production-grade AI systems to customers, including deployment, monitoring, evaluation, scaling, and ongoing operational ownership in enterprise environments.
• Full Stack experience with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and modern frameworks such as React or Angular.
• Strong distributed systems expertise, including APIs, data modeling, observability, resiliency, and performance optimization.
• Proven success leading complex projects from architecture through long-term operation.
• Deep interest in AI-native software, including LLMs, agents, retrieval, and modern AI development patterns.
• Preferred Experience
• CI/CD experience, including GitHub Actions.
• Hands-on experience integrating LLM platforms such as OpenAI and Anthropic into production applications.
• Experience with vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, and retrieval systems.
• Experience with C#/.NET, ASP.NET Core, PostgreSQL/SQL Server, and cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
• Experience in highly regulated domains such as tax, audit, legal, fintech, or other compliance-focused industries.
• #LI-SB1
• New Position: This position is open due to an existing vacancy to support our evolving business needs.

Benefits

• Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connected.
• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: Flex My Way is a set of supportive workplace policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities, whether caring for family, giving back to the community, or finding time to refresh and reset. This builds upon our flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, empowering employees to achieve a better work-life balance.
• Career Development and Growth: By fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development, we prepare our talent to tackle tomorrow’s challenges and deliver real-world solutions. Our Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.
• Industry Competitive Benefits: We offer comprehensive benefit plans to include flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, access to the Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, employee incentive programs, and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
• Culture: Globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more. We live by our values: Obsess over our Customers, Compete to Win, Challenge (Y)our Thinking, Act Fast / Learn Fast, and Stronger Together.
• Social Impact: Make an impact in your community with our Social Impact Institute. We offer employees two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.
• Making a Real-World Impact:  We are one of the few companies globally that helps its customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency. Together, with the professionals and institutions we serve, we help uphold the rule of law, turn the wheels of commerce, catch bad actors, report the facts, and provide trusted, unbiased information to people all over the world.
• Our use of AI within the recruitment process Thomson Reuters utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support parts of our global recruitment process. Unless you opt-out, our AI system will assess the information provided by you and compare it to the requirements listed for the role, and present the result to our recruitment personnel for further review. The AI system acts as a supporting tool, but there is always a human making the decision if you will be considered for the role.
• In the United States, Thomson Reuters offers a comprehensive benefits package to our employees. Our benefit package includes market competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs, as well as a competitive 401k plan with company match. In addition, Thomson Reuters offers market leading work life benefits with competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off, paid holidays (including two company mental health days off), parental leave, sabbatical leave. These benefits meet or exceeds the requirements of paid time off in accordance with any applicable state or municipal laws. Finally, Thomson Reuters offers the following additional benefits: optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance paid 100% by the employee; optional life and AD&D insurance paid 100% by the employee; Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts; fitness reimbursement; access to Employee Assistance Program; Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit paid 100% by employee; access to 529 Plan; commuter benefits; Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance; Tuition Reimbursement; and access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Thomson Reuters complies with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. The base compensation range varies across locations.

For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $127,400 USD - $236,600 USD.
For Ontario, Canada, the base compensation range for this role is $140,000 CAD - $175,000 CAD.

Base pay is positioned within the range based on several factors including an individual’s knowledge, skills and experience with consideration given to internal equity. Base pay is one part of a comprehensive Total Reward program which also includes flexible and supportive benefits and other wellbeing programs.
This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.