Principal Software Engineer / Architect – AI – Legal FDE
Thomson Reuters2 days ago
Base Salary
$159k - $340k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the long-term technical vision, strategy, standards, and roadmap for Forward Deployed Engineering.
- Lead architecture, prototyping, coding, and production delivery for complex, high-risk AI initiatives.
- Design RAG pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, event-driven backends, and agentic workflows integrated with client and legal technology environments.
- Build reusable AI components, frameworks, and solution templates and establish standards for MLOps/LLMOps, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD.
- Set strategies for monitoring, observability, LLM evaluation, quality benchmarks, red-teaming, security, data protection, and operational excellence.
- Serve as the senior technical voice in client discovery, solution shaping, executive communication, and stakeholder negotiation.
- Mentor Staff, Senior, and Lead engineers; review architecture; influence engineering culture; and provide technical leadership across teams and business units.
- Represent Thomson Reuters through speaking, publications, patents, open-source work, or standards participation.
Requirements
- 12+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in system design, distributed systems, architecture, and complex high-risk projects.
- Extensive experience owning technical requirements and strategy, setting technology roadmaps, and prioritizing investments.
- Expert hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML and LLM-powered applications in production.
- Deep proficiency with orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI, or AutoGen, plus expert knowledge of RAG architectures and vector databases.
- Hands-on experience with Model Context Protocol and Agent-to-Agent interoperability patterns.
- Expert Python experience, including FastAPI or equivalent, and strong experience with asynchronous, event-driven, and API architectures.
- Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP and infrastructure as code using Terraform, CDK, or equivalent.
- Production observability experience with Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or similar, and AI evaluation experience with LangSmith, Langfuse, Braintrust, or W&B.
- Strong background in secure API development using OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and JWT.
- Fluency with Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot and experience driving AI-native engineering practices.
- Ability to influence across teams, advise senior leadership, communicate complex ideas, operate autonomously, and lead through ambiguity.
- Preferred qualifications include regulated-industry experience, legal technology familiarity, agentic AI development, Docker/Kubernetes, MLOps/LLMOps, transformer scaling and fine-tuning knowledge, and external technical presence.
Benefits
- Flexible hybrid work model for office-based roles.
- Work-from-anywhere flexibility for up to 8 weeks per year and broader work-life balance policies.
- Career development, continuous learning, and skills-development programs.
- Comprehensive benefits including flexible vacation, mental health days, Headspace access, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, incentive programs, and wellbeing resources.
- US benefits include health, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, 401(k) matching, paid holidays, parental leave, sabbatical leave, employee assistance, commuter benefits, adoption and surrogacy assistance, and employee stock purchase plan.
- Two paid volunteer days annually and opportunities for pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.
- Eligible US locations include New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Irvine, McLean, and Washington, DC.
Tech Stack
Categories
Forward Deployed
About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters builds research platforms, workflow software, and data services for legal, tax and accounting, compliance, and government professionals, and operates the Reuters global news service. Flagship products include Westlaw for legal research and ONESOURCE and Checkpoint for tax and accounting, sold primarily via subscriptions and enterprise licenses. A public company headquartered in Toronto, it was formed in 2008 by combining Thomson Corporation and Reuters Group and is listed on the TSX and Nasdaq as TRI.