Manager, Software Engineering
Content Tools • CoCounsel Agent Context
Overview of the Role
CoCounsel Agent Context is seeking a Manager, Software Engineering to lead the engineering team responsible for building, operating, and evolving Thomson Reuters9 Content Tools platform. Content Tools are the purpose-built APIs and capabilities that give AI agents precise, reliable access to TR9s most valuable legal content 6 including case law, statutes, regulations, citations, and Practical Law materials. These tools are mission-critical infrastructure: the bridge between TR9s authoritative content assets and the AI-powered products 6 such as CoCounsel Legal 6 that depend on them.
The Manager owns the full engineering lifecycle for Content Tools: design, implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing operations. Equally important, this leader will navigate a distributed development model in which tools are built and contributed by multiple teams across the organization. The Manager is responsible for establishing governance, design standards, and contribution workflows that keep the ecosystem coherent as it grows 6 while serving as the primary engineering accountability point for tool quality, reliability, and developer experience.
This is a people and technical leadership role managing a team of 8 engineers. The successful candidate brings strong platform thinking, a collaborative leadership style, and deep credibility in building API-first systems 6 with the technical depth to engage in architecture, system design, and engineering reviews, and to contribute directly to delivery where appropriate. Experience in domains where information quality and retrieval precision carry high stakes is strongly preferred.
About the Role
In this position, you will provide:
Tool Engineering & Technical Leadership
- Own the end-to-end engineering roadmap for Content Tools 6 spanning tool design and implementation, CLI and SDK exposure, CI/CD pipelines, evaluation infrastructure, and cloud operations 6 balancing new capability delivery with rigorous quality and reliability standards
- Work alongside the team on delivery by engaging deeply in architecture and system design, participating in technical reviews, and making targeted hands-on engineering contributions when they materially advance delivery or unblock the team.
- Drive an API-first, contract-driven approach to tool development: every tool ships with a versioned CLI contract, schema, and clear ownership metadata that makes it discoverable and usable by consuming teams without direct engineering involvement
- Establish and enforce the patterns, templates, and contribution standards that allow distributed teams to build and contribute tools consistently 6 including review workflows, quality gates, namespace governance, and guidance on when to create new tools versus extend existing ones
- Lead the build-out of the information retrieval (IR) evaluation framework, ensuring every tool is validated against representative datasets before release and that performance regressions are caught automatically in CI/CD
- Champion full-stack operational ownership: the team defines, builds, tests, deploys, and operates what it ships 6 including on-call rotations, SLO definitions, incident response, and health monitoring for production tool services
- Partner closely with TR Labs and CoCounsel Engineering teams to ensure content tools meet the interface requirements of agentic workflows 6 covering tool invocation patterns, result provenance, and citation handling
- Oversee platform infrastructure, including cloud services (AWS), observability tooling, rate limiting, caching strategies, and multi-tenant access controls that protect licensed content
Distributed Development Governance
- Serve as the engineering accountability point for the Content Tools ecosystem as a whole 6 not just the tools your team builds directly, but the standards and guardrails that govern contributions from partner teams across the organization
- Define and maintain contribution workflows, architectural review criteria, and consistency checks that prevent capability duplication and ensure interoperability across a growing tool catalog
- Manage tool lifecycle policies, including deprecation, migration support, versioning strategies, and breaking-change processes 6 communicating proactively with consuming teams to minimize disruption
- Build and maintain a centralized tool registry with machine-readable descriptions, usage guidance, and performance characteristics 6 making the tool ecosystem discoverable and self-service for agent developers
- Establish shared development infrastructure 6 common libraries, boilerplate generators, mock services, and local development environments 6 that makes it easy for any team to build tools correctly
Team Management
- Build and lead a team of 8 software engineers (including Senior and Staff levels), managing hiring, onboarding, performance, and professional development with a focus on deep technical ownership
- Develop engineers who combine strong software fundamentals with domain fluency in information retrieval, content APIs, and agentic system design 6 engineers who are proud to own their work from first commit to production dashboard
- Foster a culture of empowered ownership where engineers have the autonomy to define problems, the authority to make sound technical calls, and the accountability to carry work through to reliable production operations
- Translate complex content technology concepts for non-technical stakeholders 6 making the value and trade-offs of Content Tools investments legible to product managers, business leaders, and partner teams
- Model and reinforce AI-assisted development as a team norm: more than 50% of code written with AI assistance is the target, not a stretch goal
Strategic Delivery
- Define and maintain engineering processes for a team that both builds shared tool infrastructure and delivers production content capabilities 6 ensuring rigorous testing, code review, and continuous evaluation of tool quality through offline IR grading pipelines and online signals
- Establish platform health and developer experience benchmarks 6 including tool reliability SLOs, client onboarding time-to-value, IR evaluation pass rates, and tool invocation accuracy 6 and use them to drive continuous improvement
- Evaluate and integrate emerging tool protocols (including MCP support) and retrieval patterns, with a clear-eyed view of production-readiness and operational implications
- Cultivate strong working relationships with Labs, Product, and CoCounsel Engineering 6 engaging early in agentic workflow design to ensure content tools are shaped to the access patterns agents actually need
- Collaborate across the organization to align the Content Tools roadmap with business priorities in CoCounsel Legal Next, Westlaw, and the broader TR product portfolio
About You
You9re an ideal fit if you have:
Required Experience
- Bachelor9s or Master9s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership or engineering management role
- Demonstrated experience designing and operating API-first systems consumed by multiple teams, with a product mindset toward developer experience and internal customer satisfaction
- Proficiency in Python and strong software engineering fundamentals, API design, testing strategy (unit, integration, and IR/evaluation), and CI/CD practices
- Demonstrated technical depth in complex systems, including the ability to decompose designs, reason through alternatives and trade-offs, ask incisive questions, and influence sound technical decisions in partnership with Senior and Staff engineers, architects, and scientists.
- Experience building and governing shared platform infrastructure in a distributed development model 6 including contribution standards, versioning policies, and cross-team coordination
- Strong working knowledge of information retrieval concepts 6 including precision/recall trade-offs, hybrid search, citation networks, and document retrieval patterns 6 sufficient to make sound architectural decisions and partner effectively with scientists, together with demonstrated ability to deepen expertise rapidly in adjacent domains such as agentic systems and evaluation frameworks.
- Proven ability to lead teams that own their production systems end-to-end, including on-call responsibilities, SLO management, and incident response
- Strong leadership skills: experience in agile methodologies, excellent communication, and the ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and science teams
- Awareness of AI ethics, content licensing considerations, and responsible deployment of retrieval systems
Preferred Experience
- Experience building tools or APIs for agentic AI systems, including familiarity with tool protocols such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar
- Background in legal technology, knowledge management, or other high-stakes information retrieval domains where provenance, accuracy, and entitlement enforcement are critical
- Hands-on experience with search and retrieval infrastructure (e.g., Elasticsearch, Vespa, OpenSearch) and the trade-offs between semantic and structured search
- Experience with evaluation frameworks for retrieval systems, including dataset design, IR metrics (Precision, Recall, NDCG, etc.), and CI/CD integration of quality gates
- Familiarity with content access control, policy-based entitlements, and licensing enforcement in multi-tenant environments
- Experience operationalizing tooling for LLM-powered workflows, including prompt engineering, tool description design, and agent invocation patterns
What Success Looks Like
In the first 90 days:
- Develop a thorough understanding of the current Content Tools architecture, tool inventory, CI/CD pipelines, IR evaluation infrastructure, and the most pressing gaps in quality, reliability, and developer experience
- Establish strong working relationships with CoCounsel Engineering, Product, and TR Labs teams 6 understanding each stakeholder9s priorities and pain points firsthand
- Complete any open hiring on the team, making high-quality decisions that strengthen technical depth and cultural fit
- Identify and begin addressing the highest-leverage near-term improvements to contribution governance, delivery friction, and operational posture
In the first year:
- Lead the team through a major platform milestone 6
