Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer)

Thomson Reuters•Frisco, TX

6d•$127,400 - $236,600•Hybrid

About The Position

Thomson Reuters products power the professionals who are shaping the world. Our platforms drive legal, tax, accounting and audit products, including Cloud Audit Suite—a connected set of products spanning Engagement Manager and Guided Assurance. As a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer) AI, you will own core backend and AI orchestration systems that turn frontier models into reliable, production‑grade workflows at scale. You will also help drive our shift to an engineering-led, AI-native organization, one where AI writes much of the code and engineers stay in the loop to provide judgment, architecture, and direction where it matters most. About the role: You will be a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer) responsible for the architecture and system design of Audit Suite. Shape the team's AI and patterns: Define patterns for building MCP servers, designing agents, novel uses of LLMs, experimentation, and scalable infrastructure. Your decisions will influence your product area and adjacent teams, not just a single feature. Work at real production scale: Build and evolve systems that operate over millions of documents, highly structured tax data, ever-changing laws, and thousands of concurrent AI interactions from accountants doing time‑sensitive work. Small teams, big surface area: Interact and lead across several teams of engineers, product, UX design and AI Labs partners to research, design and ship products quickly, with direct access to product leadership and customers. Great fit for people who enjoy and thrive at setting technical direction, mentoring senior engineers, and spending most of their time in the code and architecture of AI systems. Shape the platform integration strategy across new and existing Thomson Reuters audit systems to provide world-class content and solutions for our customers.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience
5-7+ years of experience in full-stack development, building scalable cloud-based applications, web services, APIs and AI-driven products.
C#, .NET expertise and experience with production systems using frameworks like ASP.NET Core (or similar), relational databases (SQLServer, PostgreSQL or equivalent), and a major cloud provider (AWS preferred, Azure).
Experience architecting and implementing accessible front-end solutions, including: JavaScript, Typescript, HTML, CSS; experience with modern JavaScript frameworks, e.g., Angular, React, etc.
Strong background in distributed systems: data modeling, API contracts, observability, resilience patterns, and performance tuning under load.
Proven track record leading large, complex projects end‑to‑end: architecture, execution, rollout, and long‑term operation.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with product, design, and ML teams in a fast‑moving environment.
Demonstrated interest in AI systems and new engineering paradigms: LLMs, agents, retrieval, or similar – you care about what “AI‑native” software should look like.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines (i.e., GitHub Actions)
Hands‑on experience integrating LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) into production applications, including prompt/response management, cost controls, and safety considerations.
Experience with AI‑adjacent infrastructure: vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, or custom retrieval pipelines.
Opinions and experience around automated testing, reliability, and release practices for systems with non-deterministic model behavior.
Prior experience in domains where correctness, auditability, and compliance matter (fintech, tax, audit, legal, or similar), or strong interest in applying AI in those contexts.

Responsibilities

Technical leadership and cross‑functional influence
Lead multi‑quarter initiatives that cut across AI, product, and infra (e.g., a new orchestration layer, a low-latency retrieval system, or a unified knowledge base).
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raising the bar on system design, code quality, and AI integration practices across the org.
Be a go-to expert in new model capabilities, collaborating closely with AI/ML engineers, researchers, designers, and PMs to translate industry improvements into reliable, user‑facing workflows that accountants trust.
Help shape the team’s roadmap, technical strategy, and engineering culture – from experimentation practices to testing, rollout, and postmortems.
Design and own AI‑first backend systems
Own the end-to-end architecture and design of backend services (C#/.NET, Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, Vercel) that integrate and orchestrate across heterogeneous systems and technology stacks, powering generative AI agents, complex workflows and document‑centric experiences.
Build and evolve AI orchestration: routing, tool calling, MCP servers, multi‑step workflows, safety and guardrails, and robust error handling around third‑party LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others).
Scale, reliability, and performance
Design for high‑throughput, low‑latency AI workloads: caching, queuing, rate‑limiting, model failover, and cost/performance trade-offs.
Work with large‑scale data: millions of documents, retrieval and search, vector stores, and indexing strategies tailored to tax and accounting use cases.
Establish and refine SLOs, observability, and incident response for AI systems that must be correct, auditable, and trustworthy in professional workflows.

Benefits

Flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role)
Flex My Way policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities
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
Two paid volunteer days off annually
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
Access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan