Lead Research Engineer, Search & Retrieval

You reach for a baseline, an ablation, and a control before you trust a result, and you have the taste to know which experiments are worth running and which are not.

You have launched search systems, not just built them, but operated them, scaled them, debugged them at 2am, and measured whether they actually made retrieval better.

You build with AI tooling rather than around it, and you bring the same skepticism to what a coding agent hands you as to what an experiment tells you.

Given a messy project, you can work out what the most impactful next thing to do is and go do it.

You can explain your work to engineers, scientists, and product stakeholders alike: defend a design choice, and update on evidence when someone shows you a better one.

~7+ years building production software, including search, retrieval, or ranking systems you shipped and then owned — launched, scaled, and maintained, not just prototyped

Hybrid Work Model:

We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connected.

Flexibility & Work-Life Balance:

Flex My Way is a set of supportive workplace policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities, whether caring for family, giving back to the community, or finding time to refresh and reset. This builds upon our flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, empowering employees to achieve a better work-life balance.

Career Development and Growth:

By fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development, we prepare our talent to tackle tomorrow’s challenges and deliver real-world solutions. Our Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.

An agent working a legal, tax, or regulatory question is only as good as the evidence handed to it, whether it can find the controlling authority in a corpus of millions of documents, weigh sources that conflict, and be honest about what it doesn't have.

This role, in TR Labs, owns the engineering behind that layer: next-generation search and retrieval serving both traditional search experiences and agentic AI workflows over large collections of legal, tax, and regulatory content.

Multiple product teams depend on what it delivers.

What makes this research engineering rather than software engineering is that the answer isn't known when you start.

Whether a different ranking model, a hybrid retrieval strategy, a new chunking scheme, or an agentic retrieval loop actually makes results better is an empirical question — and an easy one to get wrong, because a metric moving is not the same as retrieval improving.

You form the hypothesis, isolate the variable, read the numbers honestly, and kill the idea when the data says to.

Thomson Reuters informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. We serve professionals across legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media. Our products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions, and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a world leading provider of trusted journalism and news.

We are powered by the talents of 26,000 employees across more than 70 countries, where everyone has a chance to contribute and grow professionally in flexible work environments. At a time when objectivity, accuracy, fairness, and transparency are under attack, we consider it our duty to pursue them. Sound exciting? Join us and help shape the industries that move society forward.

As a global business, we rely on the unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of all employees to deliver on our business goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. Thomson Reuters is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer providing a drug-free workplace.

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