Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Thomson Reuters•Frisco, TX

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. About You You hold a PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field, with 8+ years of post-degree industry experience taking NLP and document understanding systems from development to production at scale. You have hands-on depth across the full applied arc — model development, distillation, evaluation, and deployment. You publish, you mentor, and you measure success by what ships and performs in production.

Requirements

PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field — required
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
Hierarchical, multi-label document classification with domain-specific and customer-defined schemas
Entity recognition and linking, relation extraction, citation parsing, and knowledge graph construction from unstructured text
LLM-based information extraction, few-shot and multi-task learning, and post-training
Knowledge distillation, model compression, and SLM deployment under latency constraints
Synthetic data generation and annotation workflow design
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

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.
Industry Competitive Benefits: We offer comprehensive benefit plans to include flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, access to the Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, employee incentive programs, and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
Culture: Globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more. We live by our values: Obsess over our Customers, Compete to Win, Challenge (Y)our Thinking, Act Fast / Learn Fast, and Stronger Together.
Social Impact: Make an impact in your community with our Social Impact Institute. We offer employees two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.
Making a Real-World Impact: We are one of the few companies globally that helps its customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency. Together, with the professionals and institutions we serve, we help uphold the rule of law, turn the wheels of commerce, catch bad actors, report the facts, and provide trusted, unbiased information to people all over the world.

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