Staff Software Engineer I (Open)
Thomson Reuters1 day ago
Base Salary
$118k - $220k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set the technical direction, design patterns, schema templates, contribution standards, and governance for the Content Tools catalog.
- Design and operate versioned, contract-driven APIs with discoverable ownership metadata and clear developer-facing interfaces.
- Architect retrieval and search using structured and semantic retrieval, relevance ranking, and the team’s Vespa-based search platform.
- Define MCP-based agent invocation models, tool boundaries, token-efficient payloads, and latency budgets for multi-hop retrieval.
- Build shared development and testing infrastructure, including common libraries, scaffolding generators, mock services, and local environments using Python, FastAPI, and Claude Agent SDK.
- Establish verified spec-driven development, evaluation datasets, IR metrics, CI-gated evaluation suites, and continuous offline and online quality measurement.
- Own reliability practices including SLOs, on-call models, incident response, post-mortems, observability, capacity planning, caching, and rate limiting.
- Serve as the technical authority for Content Tools architecture and evaluation, author architecture decision records, and shape code and design-review policies.
- Mentor senior engineers, guide architecture and design pairing, build cross-team relationships, and establish AI-assisted development patterns.
- Drive major Content Tools initiatives from design through production and advise leadership on complex architectural, security, and responsible-AI decisions.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with progression to staff-level or equivalent technical leadership, including functional-area ownership and significant cross-team initiatives.
- Mastery of Python and strong fundamentals in API design, testing strategy, system design, and security architecture.
- Experience designing and operating API-first systems used by multiple teams, including versioning, backward compatibility, clear contracts, and developer-experience ownership.
- Working fluency in information retrieval concepts including precision, recall, hybrid search, ranking, and citation networks.
- Experience designing or owning retrieval or LLM evaluation frameworks, including dataset design, IR metrics, CI-gated evaluation suites, tracing, and observability for non-deterministic workflows.
- System-level reliability ownership involving on-call models, SLOs, incident response, and frequent production delivery.
- Demonstrated security and access-control practice.
- Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and ability to establish effective team-wide usage patterns.
- Strong communication and ability to align engineering, product, science, and non-technical stakeholders.
- Preferred experience with agentic AI tools or APIs, MCP or similar protocols, legal technology or other high-stakes information domains, and source attribution or entitlement enforcement.
- Preferred hands-on experience with OpenSearch, Vespa, or Elasticsearch, including cluster sizing and index lifecycle management.
- Preferred experience operationalizing LLM workflow tooling, including tool descriptions, prompt engineering, and agent invocation patterns.
- Preferred experience with platform contribution governance, content licensing and policy-based entitlements, Terraform, and API gateways such as Apigee.
Benefits
- Flexible hybrid work model for office-based roles.
- Work-from-anywhere flexibility for up to 8 weeks per year and supportive work-life balance policies.
- Career development, continuous learning, Grow My Way programming, and skills-first development support.
- Comprehensive benefits including flexible vacation, two company-wide mental health days, Headspace, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, incentive programs, and wellbeing resources.
- US benefits include health, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, 401(k) with company match, paid holidays, parental leave, sabbatical leave, commuter benefits, fitness reimbursement, employee assistance, adoption and surrogacy assistance, and employee stock purchase plan.
- 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.