Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer)

Thomson Reuters products power the professionals who are shaping the world. Our platforms drive legal, tax, accounting and audit products, including Cloud Audit Suite—a connected set of products spanning Engagement Manager and Guided Assurance. As a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer AI), you will own core backend and AI orchestration systems that turn frontier models into reliable, production‑grade workflows at scale. You will also help drive our shift to an engineering-led, AI-native organization, one where AI writes much of the code and engineers stay in the loop to provide judgment, architecture, and direction where it matters most.

About the role:

You will be a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer) responsible for the architecture and system design of Audit Suite.

• Shape the team's AI and patterns: Define patterns for building MCP servers, designing agents, novel uses of LLMs, experimentation, and scalable infrastructure. Your decisions will influence your product area and adjacent teams, not just a single feature.

• Work at real production scale: Build and evolve systems that operate over millions of documents, highly structured tax data, ever-changing laws, and thousands of concurrent AI interactions from accountants doing time‑sensitive work.

• Small teams, big surface area: Interact and lead across several teams of engineers, product, UX design and AI Labs partners to research, design and ship products quickly, with direct access to product leadership and customers.

• Great fit for people who enjoy and thrive at setting technical direction, mentoring senior engineers, and spending most of their time in the code and architecture of AI systems.

• Shape the platform integration strategy across new and existing Thomson Reuters audit systems to provide world-class content and solutions for our customers.

What you'll do:

Technical leadership and cross‑functional influence

• Lead multi‑quarter initiatives that cut across AI, product, and infra (e.g., a new orchestration layer, a low-latency retrieval system, or a unified knowledge base).

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raising the bar on system design, code quality, and AI integration practices across the org.

• Be a go-to expert in new model capabilities, collaborating closely with AI/ML engineers, researchers, designers, and PMs to translate industry improvements into reliable, user‑facing workflows that accountants trust.

• Help shape the team’s roadmap, technical strategy, and engineering culture – from experimentation practices to testing, rollout, and postmortems.

Design and own AI‑first backend systems

• Own the end-to-end architecture and design of backend services (C#/.NET, Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, Vercel) that integrate and orchestrate across heterogeneous systems and technology stacks, powering generative AI agents, complex workflows and document‑centric experiences.

• Build and evolve AI orchestration: routing, tool calling, MCP servers, multi‑step workflows, safety and guardrails, and robust error handling around third‑party LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others).

Scale, reliability, and performance

• Design for high‑throughput, low‑latency AI workloads: caching, queuing, rate‑limiting, model failover, and cost/performance trade-offs.

• Work with large‑scale data: millions of documents, retrieval and search, vector stores, and indexing strategies tailored to tax and accounting use cases.

• Establish and refine SLOs, observability, and incident response for AI systems that must be correct, auditable, and trustworthy in professional workflows.

About You:

You are a fit for the position of Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer) if your background includes:

Required Experience & Skills:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience

• Overall 10+ years cumulative experience with 2 years in a lead role and minimum 5+ years full-stack development, building scalable cloud-based applications, web services, APIs and AI-driven products.

• C#, .NET expertise and experience with production systems using frameworks like ASP.NET Core (or similar), relational databases (SQLServer, PostgreSQL or equivalent), and a major cloud provider (AWS preferred, Azure).

• Experience architecting and implementing accessible front-end solutions, including: JavaScript, Typescript, HTML, CSS; experience with modern JavaScript frameworks, e.g., Angular, React, etc.

• Strong background in distributed systems: data modeling, API contracts, observability, resilience patterns, and performance tuning under load.

• Proven track record leading large, complex projects end‑to‑end: architecture, execution, rollout, and long‑term operation.

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with product, design, and ML teams in a fast‑moving environment.

• Demonstrated interest in AI systems and new engineering paradigms: LLMs, agents, retrieval, or similar – you care about what “AI‑native” software should look like.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines (i.e., GitHub Actions)

• Hands‑on experience integrating LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) into production applications, including prompt/response management, cost controls, and safety considerations.

• Experience with AI‑adjacent infrastructure: vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, or custom retrieval pipelines.

• Opinions and experience around automated testing, reliability, and release practices for systems with non-deterministic model behavior.

• Prior experience in domains where correctness, auditability, and compliance matter (fintech, tax, audit, legal, or similar), or strong interest in applying AI in those contexts.

#LI-DD3

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role) 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.

About Us

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.

We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. More information on requesting an accommodation here.

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