Staff Software Engineer - AI Platform

About the role: You will be a Lead Software Engineer (Staff Engineer) responsible for the backend and orchestration layer powering AI agents, conversations, workspaces, and knowledge base across CoCounsel for Audit.

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

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 team, big surface area: Join a tight group of senior engineers and researchers shipping quickly, with direct access to product leadership and customers.

Think ownership of a startup with the runway of a public company. 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.

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 Provide your technical POV on architecting and implementing backend services (Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, Vercel) that power generative AI agents, complex workflows (e.g., tax filing, advisory, audit), 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 (Staff Engineer) if your background includes: Required Experience & Skills: Bachelor's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience 5-7+ years of experience in full-stack development, building scalable cloud-based applications, web services, APIs and AI-driven products.

Deep Python expertise and experience with production systems using frameworks like FastAPI (or similar), relational databases (PostgreSQL or equivalent), and a major cloud provider (AWS preferred).

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 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-TH1 This posting is for proactive recruitment purposes and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies within our organization.

What's in it For You? 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.

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.

Eligible office location(s) for this role include one or more of the following: New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and/or Irvine, CA; McLean, VA; Washington, DC.

The base compensation range for the role in any of those locations is $146,800 USD - $272,600 USD. 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.

This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.

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.

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.

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