Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Thomson Reuters•Frisco, TX

2d•$147,600 - $274,200•Remote

About The Position

This role sits within the applied science function. You will own the design, development, and production deployment of document understanding systems that directly power Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel. The problems are real, the scale is large, and the expectation is shipped, reliable, measurable impact. You will work across semantic chunking, document enrichment, knowledge graph construction, and synthetic data generation for complex legal, tax, and accounting content. Multiple product teams depend on what this function delivers.

Requirements

PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field
8+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping document understanding, information extraction, or knowledge graph systems into production — not research-only experience
Publications at ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent
Production Python and experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and DeepSpeed
Hands-on production depth required in: Document layout analysis and semantic chunking beyond fixed-size or paragraph-based methods
Hands-on production depth required in: Hierarchical, multi-label document classification with domain-specific and customer-defined schemas
Hands-on production depth required in: Entity recognition and linking, relation extraction, citation parsing, and knowledge graph construction from unstructured text
Hands-on production depth required in: LLM-based information extraction, few-shot and multi-task learning, and post-training
Hands-on production depth required in: Knowledge distillation, model compression, and SLM deployment under latency constraints
Hands-on production depth required in: Synthetic data generation and annotation workflow design
Hands-on production depth required in: End-to-end evaluation framework design for document understanding

Nice To Haves

Legal document understanding, legal IE, or legal AI experience
Complex document structures: nested hierarchies, cross-references, non-uniform formatting
Retrieval or QA systems over large document collections
RAG and agentic workflows in enterprise settings
Knowledge graph frameworks for legal or enterprise applications
AzureML or AWS SageMaker

Responsibilities

Design and deploy semantic chunking models for lengthy, non-uniformly structured legal documents with adjustable granularity across use cases
Build document enrichment systems using legal and customer-defined taxonomies
Develop LLM-based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link citations, entities, and legal concepts across diverse legal content
Lead knowledge distillation efforts to compress large models into latency-constrained, production-ready SLMs
Design evaluation frameworks — component-level and end-to-end — using expert annotation and synthetic data
Own technical decisions on architecture, chunking strategy, classification approach, and knowledge extraction methods
Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines
Provide technical input to senior leadership on AI strategy and roadmap
Mentor applied scientists and ML practitioners on the team

Benefits

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.
Flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year
Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach
Flexible vacation
Two company-wide Mental Health Days off
Access to the Headspace app
Retirement savings
Tuition reimbursement
Employee incentive programs
Resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing
Market competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs
Competitive 401k plan with company match
Competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off
Paid holidays (including two company mental health days off)
Parental leave
Sabbatical leave
Optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance paid 100% by the employee
Optional life and AD&D insurance paid 100% by the employee
Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts
Fitness reimbursement
Access to Employee Assistance Program
Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit paid 100% by employee
Access to 529 Plan
Commuter benefits
Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance
Two paid volunteer days off annually
Opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives
Access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan