Lead Software Engineer, AI

Thomson Reuters•Eagan, MN

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

This role focuses on architecting and leading the development of AI agents for legal professionals. The team utilizes AI-native engineering practices and tools to build scalable infrastructure, tooling, and observability for AI agents. The position involves setting technical direction, hands-on leadership, architecting production AI systems using LLM APIs and agent SDKs, designing observability and evaluation practices, advancing deployment and operation of AI agents, driving design reviews, and mentoring senior engineers. The goal is to enable legal professionals to make more decisive judgments with greater leverage.

Requirements

Extensive experience architecting and shipping production software systems, including hands-on experience building AI/LLM-powered products or agentic systems (not solely classical ML/data science).
Direct experience building with modern LLM APIs, agent frameworks/SDKs, or agent-to-tool integration protocols.
A track record of setting technical direction across multiple concurrent initiatives, not just delivering one project end-to-end.
Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including distributed systems design, service architecture, and cloud infrastructure.
Experience designing for production reliability and observability: monitoring, evaluation pipelines, incident response, and quality regression detection.
Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and influence technical culture and practices.
Comfort operating with high autonomy on a fast-moving, senior-heavy team that builds with AI-native/agentic engineering practices.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading architecture for developer-facing platforms, plugin/extension systems, or integration ecosystems.
Familiarity with progressive delivery practices (feature flagging, phased rollout, blue/green deployment) at scale.
Experience pushing a team toward elite software delivery practices: progressive delivery, shift-left quality/testing, and the kind of engineering discipline reflected in metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate.
Experience with managed agent runtime infrastructure (e.g., AWS Bedrock AgentCore or similar).
Domain expertise in legal, regulated, professional-services, or other fiduciary domains is a plus, but not required.

Responsibilities

Set technical architecture and direction across the team's highest-priority initiatives, spanning core agent infrastructure, new internal tooling, and production reliability.
Provide hands-on technical leadership wherever it matters most, flexing across the team's highest-priority initiatives rather than being locked into a single fixed workstream.
Architect and build production AI agent systems on top of modern LLM APIs, agent SDKs, and orchestration/runtime infrastructure, designed to scale and integrate cleanly with existing platform services.
Design agent observability and evaluation practices (tracing, automated evals, and quality/drift detection) so regressions in agent behavior get caught before they reach customers.
Advance how the team deploys and operates AI agents in production, deepening practices like progressive/feature-flagged rollout and earlier-stage quality signals so releases get both faster and safer over time.
Drive cross-cutting design reviews and technical decisions (RFCs/ADRs) to keep new systems coherent as multiple initiatives move in parallel.
Mentor and raise the technical bar for a senior engineering team, including how they use AI-native, agentic development practices to multiply their own output.
Partner with product and engineering leadership to translate strategic priorities into concrete system architecture and sequencing decisions.

Benefits

Hybrid Work Model
Flexibility & Work-Life Balance
Work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year
Career Development and Growth
Industry Competitive Benefits
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
Globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more.
Two paid volunteer days off annually
Opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.
Health insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Disability insurance
Life insurance
401k plan with company match
Paid holidays
Parental leave
Sabbatical leave
Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts
Fitness reimbursement
Access to Employee Assistance Program
Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance
Employee Stock Purchase Plan