Staff Software Engineer, Search Retrieval Platform
Thomson Reuters4 days ago
Base Salary
$118k - $253k/yr
Responsibilities
- Translate customer and product needs into reusable platform capabilities by working with product, client, and agent-building teams.
- Design retrieval APIs and search services with consistent contracts, tunable filtering and ranking, predictable latency, and agent-oriented result payloads.
- Build customizable, pluggable retrieval components for chunking, enrichment, embedding, ranking, and custom models.
- Own content ingestion, indexing, search engine configuration, and zero-downtime index changes.
- Partner with research engineering and applied science to productionize embedding, hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, and agentic retrieval techniques.
- Build offline evaluation, search grading, LLM-as-judge scoring, and online experimentation capabilities.
- Own multi-tenant isolation, query-time entitlements, content-protecting telemetry, SLOs, observability, tracing, on-call, and incident-driven improvements.
- Set architectural direction, lead cross-team initiatives, mentor engineers, and serve as the technical authority for retrieval.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with progression to staff-level scope, including ownership of a functional area and cross-functional leadership.
- A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Experience building search, retrieval, or data-intensive platforms at scale with strong distributed systems fundamentals using a language such as Python, Java, or Go.
- Experience translating customer needs into platform capabilities across product, engineering, and science teams.
- Experience designing APIs and services used by multiple teams, including contracts, versioning, and developer experience.
- Operational experience with SLOs, observability, on-call ownership, and incident learning.
- Fluency with AI-assisted development tools.
- Preferred experience with Vespa, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch; hybrid retrieval, ranking, embedding pipelines; AI-agent tools and MCP; search evaluation; multi-tenant authorization and entitlements; and production ML model serving, promotion, and monitoring.
Benefits
- Flexible hybrid work model for office-based roles.
- Work-from-anywhere flexibility for up to 8 weeks per year and supportive work-life policies.
- Career development, continuous learning, and skills-development programs.
- Comprehensive benefits including flexible vacation, two company-wide mental health days, Headspace access, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, incentive programs, and wellbeing resources.
- US benefits include health, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, a 401(k) with company match, paid holidays, parental leave, sabbatical leave, and additional insurance and spending-account options.
- Two paid volunteer days annually and opportunities for pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.
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.