Manager, Software Engineering — Customer Files Orchestration

Thomson Reuters • Eagan, MN

5d • Hybrid

About The Position

CoCounsel Legal is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead the team that owns the Customer Files Orchestration Service – the system that makes a customer's documents usable by CoCounsel Legal's agents. Every file a customer brings to CoCounsel passes through this team: upload, storage, extraction, embedding, and indexing, orchestrated end-to-end. This team is a critical part of what makes the combination of customer content with Thomson Reuters' proprietary content and frontier models possible. This role will help take a recently formed, cross-functional group and shape it into a durable, high-performing engineering team with clear ownership, a stable operational posture, and the credibility to lead decisions about design, roadmaps, and opportunity costs within the team and across stakeholders.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or master's degree – Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Direct people management experience – 8 + years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years of managing engineers. You have hired, coached, and managed performance, and you want to keep doing it.
• Large-scale, enterprise orchestration systems – Demonstrated experience designing and operating them in production: pipelines that move large volumes of work through multiple stages, across service boundaries, with retries, partial failure, and long-running steps as the normal case rather than the exception.
• Extensive AWS and production Python experience – This is a Python service on AWS, and you should be able to engage with the code and the infrastructure credibly.
• Concurrency in Python, and a healthy respect for how treacherous it is – You understand the GIL and what it does and does not protect you from; you have written and debugged production asyncio code.
• Containerized workloads on Kubernetes – Our workers and APIs run as pods with event-driven autoscaling. You do not need to write the manifests, but you do need to reason pod-level concurrency, resource limits, scaling behavior, and when scaling out is the wrong answer to a bottleneck.
• Consistency models – You can explain where eventual consistency is safe and where it silently corrupts a user-visible outcome, and you have debugged the difference in production.
• Delivery guarantees – At-least-once versus exactly-once, why idempotency is usually the real answer.
• Queues, fair queuing, rate limiting, and backpressure – Deep, practical understanding, including multi-tenant fairness and noisy-neighbor isolation, and the judgment for where flow control belongs in a system.
• API-first instincts – Versioned contracts, clear ownership, backward compatibility, and treating an internal API as a product with consumers rather than an implementation detail. You have strong opinions about where business logic belongs in a system.
• Building, owning, and operating a production service end-to-end – You have carried the pager for something and you believe building and operating are inseparable.
• Distributed systems and cloud fundamentals – Advanced knowledge of distributed systems design, cloud infrastructure, observability, and SDLC best practices.
• Communication and alignment – Excellent communication and the ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and architecture, including with people who do not report to you.

Nice To Haves

• Documents and document management systems – Extraction, OCR, format handling, very large files, and the integration surface of third-party DMS platforms are relevant.
• Team Topologies – This organization uses its vocabulary natively (stream-aligned teams, platform teams, and the boundaries between them) to reason about how services and teams should be shaped.
• Event-driven architectures and streaming – Kafka/MSK or similar, managed queueing such as SQS, and event-driven autoscaling.
• Durable workflow engines – Temporal, Step Functions, or similar, with a clear view of when they are worth adopting.
• Retrieval, embedding, or indexing pipelines – Supporting LLM or agentic applications.
• Prior exposure to the legal industry – A real bonus, and a meaningful head start on understanding what our customers need from their documents.

Responsibilities

• Own customer file orchestration service end-to-end – Upload, storage, content extraction, embedding, indexing, and observability and monitoring – balancing new capability delivery against reliability.
• Drive API-first execution – Treat the file and workspace APIs this team owns as a product – clear ownership, versioned contracts, documented behavior, deliberate change management, and independent deployability.
• Lead the team's judgment on the problems that define the domain – Consistency models, delivery guarantees, lease and heartbeat models for crash recovery, and state transitions across asynchronous service boundaries.
• Own the queuing and flow-control architecture – Fair queuing, rate limiting, backpressure, circuit breaking, dead-letter handling, and autoscaling.
• Champion full operational ownership – The team designs, builds, tests, deploys, scales, and operates what it ships – with on-call, incident response, SLOs, and testing treated as first-class engineering work.
• Partner with platforms and client applications teams to deliver a world-class product – Leverage robust orchestration across other (internal and external) services to enable both human users and agents with world-class experiences.
• Build and lead the Files Orchestration engineering team – Hiring, onboarding, performance, and career development – turning a recently-formed cross-functional group into a stable team with clear, durable ownership.
• Develop engineers who combine distributed systems depth with real operational responsibility – Lead an engineering team who own their work from the first line of code to the production dashboard, and who own testing/QA, deployments, and support rather than handing them off.
• Translate complex orchestration and scale trade-offs to product managers and business leaders – Making the meaning of a throughput number and the risk in a deadline legible to non-engineers.
• Establish operating rhythms and ways of working – Establish principled ways of working, empowering the team to own their operating rhythms: roadmap, stand-ups, demos, retros, support rotations, and beyond.
• Strong technical leadership via effective negotiation and influence – Earn the trust of leaders and external teams, negotiating capacity and roadmaps to converge on technical decisions that result in world-class products.
• Define and maintain engineering processes – Rigorous design, code review, testing, and instrumentation good enough to proactively identify and fix issues, provide great support and reliable service.
• Establish service health benchmarks – Ingest throughput, end-to-end time-to-available, failure and retry rates, per-tenant fairness under load, and API reliability SLOs – used to drive continuous improvement rather than to decorate a dashboard.
• Sequence foundational infrastructure work against product deadlines – Know when to ship the pragmatic stopgap, when to insist on the structural fix, and how to make the difference visible to leadership.
• Align the roadmap with CoCounsel's priorities – Collaborate closely with product management and adjacent engineering teams to deliver high-quality capabilities and strong technical foundations.

Benefits

• Hybrid Work Model
• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance
• Work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year
• Career Development and Growth
• Grow My Way programming
• Skills-first approach
• 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.
• 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
• 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
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager