Engineering Manager, AI

Thomson Reuters•Frisco, TX

4d•$118,400 - $219,800•Hybrid

About The Position

The Engineering Manager will build and lead a team of software engineers, including Senior and Staff engineers, developing full-stack products, AI-enabled features, and services for Westlaw’s next-generation legal research experiences. The team will build agentic legal research experiences and retrieval services grounded in trusted legal content. The manager will remain hands-on, contributing to architecture, engineering standards, coding, reviews, prototyping, and resolution of critical production issues, while guiding work with agentic systems, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and large language models (LLMs). The role also champions AI-assisted development and responsible use of AI across the engineering lifecycle. The position combines people leadership, technical direction, AI-enabled engineering, and strategic delivery. It oversees scalable user interfaces, backend services, RESTful APIs, and cloud-native AWS solutions, while ensuring secure, reliable, maintainable, and high-performing systems. The manager establishes engineering and DevOps practices, guides incremental delivery aligned with product roadmaps, and works with Product, Design, and cross-functional stakeholders. The role requires keeping current with developments in AI, cloud computing, and software engineering and applying relevant advances to team practices.

Requirements

At least 8 years of hands-on software engineering experience across front end and back end, building scalable web applications.
At least 3 years managing engineering teams.
Track record leading teams that ship and operate production-grade full-stack systems at scale, including secure coding and reliability practices.
Experience remaining hands-on in architecture discussions, design decisions, code reviews, and prototyping.
Hands-on experience building with LLMs in production or serious prototypes, such as RAG, prompt and context design, evaluation, or agent workflows.
Daily use of AI coding tools, such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code.
Experience leading or contributing hands-on to a team that builds and uses AI agents, with strong review, quality, and security practices.
Understanding of REST API design, including resource modeling and URI design; HTTP methods and status codes; idempotency; pagination, filtering, and versioning; authentication and authorization; consistent error handling; and API documentation such as OpenAPI/Swagger.
Strong proficiency in Python and in designing and building RESTful APIs.
Working proficiency in React or a similar modern UI framework such as Angular or Vue, and experience with TypeScript and Node.js.
Strong knowledge of AWS architecture and services, with experience in DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code.
Experience hiring, coaching, mentoring, and developing engineers, including Senior and Staff engineers.
Experience partnering with Product, Design, and cross-functional leaders to set strategy and execute against it.
Excellent communication skills, including setting clear goals, providing direct feedback, and aligning stakeholders.
Ability to operate in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment and make data-driven decisions as priorities evolve.
Strategic mindset and ability to align technical decisions with business goals.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience shipping AI-driven or agentic systems in production, including LLM orchestration, RAG and information retrieval, agent frameworks, and tool protocols such as MCP, using LLM APIs such as OpenAI or Anthropic reliably at scale.
Experience with agent evaluation, including testing, benchmarking, and monitoring agent behavior.
Experience with Python frameworks such as Django, Flask, or FastAPI.
Background managing mixed teams of front-end, back-end, and software/AI engineers.
Track record of changing team mindsets and helping engineers adopt new tools and ways of working.
Exposure to legal or other regulated professional domains.
AWS certifications, such as Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer.

Responsibilities

Build and lead a team of software engineers, including Senior and Staff engineers; oversee hiring, onboarding, performance management, and professional development.
Develop engineers’ software fundamentals and expertise in information retrieval and agentic system design.
Foster empowered ownership, sound technical decision-making, reliable production operations, and continuous learning.
Lead hands-on through coding, code reviews, prototyping, architecture and design decisions, and resolution of critical production issues.
Translate technical concepts and trade-offs into clear terms for stakeholders.
Oversee development of scalable user interfaces, backend services, and RESTful APIs.
Drive GenAI and LLM integration initiatives and shape architecture, engineering standards, coding practices, and code review processes.
Promote DevOps ownership of build, deployment, monitoring, and reliability, supported by automation and CI/CD.
Ensure functional and non-functional requirements are met, including performance, scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability.
Embed quality and security through rigorous testing, secure coding, and continuous evaluation.
Design and manage cloud-native solutions on AWS.
Evaluate and integrate emerging tool protocols, such as MCP, and retrieval patterns while considering production readiness and operational implications.
Establish team practices for AI-assisted and agent-driven development, including monitoring and optimizing token consumption.
Lead AI-agent-assisted feature development with clear task specifications, human review of generated code, and accountability for shipped work.
Apply AI to code generation, code review, test automation, and quality evaluation with security, data-handling, and responsible-use guardrails.
Define measures for AI and agent impact on delivery speed, code quality, and defect rates.
Maintain secure engineering processes for teams building and delivering flagship legal research products.
Deliver solutions aligned with product roadmaps through incremental delivery, dependency management, and success-metric tracking.
Stay current with AI, cloud computing, and software engineering developments and incorporate them into team practices.

Benefits

Flexible hybrid work environment for office-based roles.
Work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
Flexible vacation and supportive workplace policies.
Two company-wide Mental Health Days off.
Access to the Headspace app.
Retirement savings plan, including a 401(k) plan with company match for eligible US employees.
Tuition reimbursement.
Employee incentive programs; the role may also be eligible for an annual bonus based on enterprise and individual performance.
Health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs.
Paid holidays, sick and safe paid time off, and parental leave.
Sabbatical leave.
Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts.
Fitness reimbursement and Employee Assistance Program.
Commuter benefits.
Adoption and surrogacy assistance.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
Two paid volunteer days off annually.
Optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance, optional life and AD&D insurance, and group legal identity theft protection, paid 100% by the employee.