Thomson Reuters

Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer)

Thomson Reuters$127K — $236K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience
  • 10+ years cumulative experience in software development
  • 2 years in a lead engineering role
  • 5+ years of experience building scalable cloud-based applications
  • Expertise in C# and .NET frameworks with cloud provider experience, preferably AWS
  • Strong understanding of distributed systems and performance tuning
  • Excellent communicator, with ability to collaborate across teams

Responsibilities

  • Define AI patterns for building scalable architecture and infrastructure
  • Lead multi-quarter AI and product initiatives across engineering teams
  • Mentor and elevate engineering talent on system design and integration practices
  • Own the architecture and design of backend services for AI workflows
  • Develop robust AI orchestration and error handling systems
  • Design scalable solutions for high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads
  • Establish observability and incident response for AI systems

Benefits

  • Engagement with product leadership and direct customer interaction
  • Opportunity to work at production scale with real-time data
  • Small team structure fostering cross-functional collaboration
  • Focus on mentoring and technical leadership
  • Emphasis on shaping technical direction and team culture
Full Job Description

You will be a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer) responsible for the architecture and system design of Audit Suite. 

  • Shape the team's AI 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. 

  • 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 teams, big surface area: Interact and lead across several teams of engineers, product, UX design and AI Labs partners to research, design and ship products quickly, with direct access to product leadership and customers.   

  • 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. 

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

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 

  • Own the end-to-end architecture and design of backend services (C#/.NET, Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, Vercel) that integrate and orchestrate across heterogeneous systems and technology stacks, powering generative AI agents, complex workflows 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 AI (Staff Engineer) if your background includes: 

Required Experience & Skills: 

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience 

  • Overall 10+ years cumulative experience with 2 years in a lead role and minimum 5+ years full-stack development, building scalable cloud-based applications, web services, APIs and AI-driven products. 

  • C#, .NET expertiseand experience withproduction systemsusing frameworks like ASP.NET Core (or similar), relational databases (SQLServer, PostgreSQL or equivalent), and amajor cloud provider(AWS preferred, Azure). 

  • Experience architecting and implementing accessible front-end solutions, including: JavaScript, Typescript, HTML, CSS; experience with modern JavaScript frameworks, e.g., Angular, React, etc. 

  • Strong background in distributed systems: data modeling, API contracts, observability, resilience patterns, and performance tuning under load. 

  • Proven track record leading large, complex projects end0to0end: architecture, execution, rollout, and long0term operation. 

  • Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with product, design, and ML teams in a fast0moving environment. 

  • Demonstrated interest in AI systems and new engineering paradigms: LLMs, agents, retrieval, or similar 6 you care about what AI0native software should look like. 

Preferred Skills & Experience 

  • Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines (i.e., GitHub Actions) 

  • Hands0on experience integrating LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) into production applications, including prompt/response management, cost controls, and safety considerations.

  • Experience with AI0adjacent 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.

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About Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters Corporation is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at 333 Bay Street. Thomson Reuters provides professionals with the intelligence, technology, and human expertise they need to find trusted answers in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, and media markets. The company is dual-listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange. In 2019, the company reported revenues of $5.9 billion and net income of $1.3 billion.
Learn more about Thomson Reuters
Size
24,400 employees
Market Cap
$53.8 billion
Industry
Founded
2008
5 Year Trend
-10.7%
NASDAQ

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