Senior Software Engineer, Search Platform
Thomson Reuters1 day ago
Base Salary
$118k - $219k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and test platform services for document ingestion, search indexing, and query APIs.
- Develop reliable pipelines for parsing, chunking, enrichment, and indexing with retries, dead-letter queues, and idempotent processing.
- Build self-service APIs for configuring search systems, managing index lifecycles, and monitoring ingestion health.
- Design retrieval interfaces for products and AI agents with predictable contracts, latency budgets, and LLM-context-sized result payloads.
- Contribute to the migration from OpenSearch to Vespa, including schema migrations and zero-downtime index promotion.
- Instrument retrieval components for offline evaluation and LLM-as-judge grading of search quality.
- Participate in on-call rotation, lead incident response, and implement systemic reliability fixes.
- Add logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and SLOs to production components.
- Improve deployment speed, test reliability, and local development workflows using AI-assisted development tools.
- Provide technical direction, translate requirements into executable work, collaborate with client teams, and mentor junior engineers.
- Work with research scientists to productionize embedding models, chunking strategies, and re-ranking capabilities.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend or data infrastructure systems with end-to-end ownership.
- A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Strong programming ability in Python, Java, Go, or an equivalent language.
- Strong distributed-systems fundamentals, including queues, streaming pipelines, and distributed data stores.
- Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, preferably AWS, and infrastructure as code.
- Experience with on-call operations, incident response, and observability.
- Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Preferred: production search-engine experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Vespa, or Solr.
- Preferred: experience with Kafka or another event-streaming platform.
- Preferred: experience integrating embedding, re-ranking, and RAG components with error handling and fallbacks.
- Preferred: exposure to agentic retrieval, search evaluation, relevance experiments, and query-log analysis.
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.
- Health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance; retirement savings or 401(k) with company match; paid time off; holidays; parental leave; and sabbatical leave.
- Mental Health Days, Headspace access, fitness reimbursement, Employee Assistance Program, tuition reimbursement, commuter benefits, and flexible spending and health savings accounts.
- Employee incentive programs, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, adoption and surrogacy assistance, and optional supplemental insurance programs.
- Two paid volunteer days annually and opportunities for pro-bono and ESG initiatives.
- Eligible locations include specified offices in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Irvine, McLean, Washington, DC, and Ontario, Canada.
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.