Manager, Software Development Engineering- Search & IR

Thomson Reuters•Frisco, TX

5d•$118,400 - $219,800•Hybrid

About The Position

The Manager, Software Engineering leads the engineering team responsible for building, operating, and evolving Thomson Reuters’ Content Tools platform. Content Tools are APIs and capabilities that provide AI agents with precise, reliable access to legal content such as case law, statutes, regulations, citations, and Practical Law materials. They connect Thomson Reuters’ authoritative content with AI-powered products, including CoCounsel Legal. This manager owns the full engineering lifecycle for Content Tools, including design, implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing operations. The role also governs contributions from distributed teams by establishing design standards, governance, and contribution workflows, and serves as the primary engineering accountability point for tool quality, reliability, and developer experience. It combines people leadership for a team of eight engineers with technical leadership, including architecture and system design engagement, engineering reviews, and targeted hands-on contributions where appropriate. The manager will lead platform engineering and operational ownership, develop shared infrastructure and a discoverable tool registry, guide information retrieval evaluation, and work closely with TR Labs, CoCounsel Engineering, Product, and other teams. The role also includes hiring, onboarding, performance management, professional development, roadmap alignment, and communication of technical concepts and trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
At least 6 years of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years in technical leadership or engineering management.
Demonstrated experience designing and operating API-first systems used by multiple teams, with a product mindset toward developer experience and internal customer satisfaction.
Proficiency in Python and strong software engineering fundamentals, API design, unit and integration testing, IR/evaluation testing, and CI/CD practices.
Technical depth in complex systems, including the ability to decompose designs, assess alternatives and trade-offs, ask incisive questions, and influence technical decisions with senior engineers, architects, and scientists.
Experience building and governing shared platform infrastructure in a distributed development model, including contribution standards, versioning policies, and cross-team coordination.
Strong working knowledge of information retrieval concepts, including precision/recall trade-offs, hybrid search, citation networks, and document retrieval patterns.
Ability to deepen expertise rapidly in adjacent domains such as agentic systems and evaluation frameworks.
Proven ability to lead teams that own production systems end-to-end, including on-call responsibilities, SLO management, and incident response.
Strong leadership skills, experience with agile methodologies, excellent communication, and ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and science teams.
Awareness of AI ethics, content licensing considerations, and responsible deployment of retrieval systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience building tools or APIs for agentic AI systems, including familiarity with MCP or similar tool protocols.
Background in legal technology, knowledge management, or other high-stakes information retrieval domains where provenance, accuracy, and entitlement enforcement are critical.
Hands-on experience with search and retrieval infrastructure such as Elasticsearch, Vespa, or OpenSearch, and knowledge of semantic and structured search trade-offs.
Experience with retrieval evaluation frameworks, including dataset design, IR metrics such as Precision, Recall, and NDCG, and CI/CD integration of quality gates.
Familiarity with content access control, policy-based entitlements, and licensing enforcement in multi-tenant environments.
Experience operationalizing tools for LLM-powered workflows, including prompt engineering, tool description design, and agent invocation patterns.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end engineering roadmap for Content Tools, including tool design and implementation, CLI and SDK exposure, CI/CD pipelines, evaluation infrastructure, and cloud operations.
Engage in architecture and system design, participate in technical reviews, and make targeted hands-on engineering contributions when useful to delivery or unblocking the team.
Drive an API-first, contract-driven approach, ensuring tools have versioned CLI contracts, schemas, and ownership metadata.
Establish and enforce development patterns, templates, contribution standards, review workflows, quality gates, namespace governance, and guidance for creating or extending tools.
Lead development of the information retrieval evaluation framework and ensure tools are evaluated against representative datasets, with automated performance regression detection in CI/CD.
Lead full-stack operational ownership, including on-call rotations, SLOs, incident response, and production health monitoring.
Partner with TR Labs and CoCounsel Engineering on tool interfaces for agentic workflows, including invocation patterns, result provenance, and citation handling.
Oversee platform infrastructure, including AWS cloud services, observability, rate limiting, caching, and multi-tenant access controls.
Serve as the engineering accountability point for the Content Tools ecosystem, including standards and guardrails for partner-team contributions.
Define contribution workflows, architectural review criteria, and consistency checks to prevent duplication and ensure interoperability.
Manage tool lifecycle policies, including deprecation, migration support, versioning, and breaking-change processes; communicate changes to consuming teams.
Build and maintain a centralized tool registry with machine-readable descriptions, usage guidance, and performance characteristics.
Establish shared development infrastructure such as common libraries, boilerplate generators, mock services, and local development environments.
Lead a team of eight software engineers, including hiring, onboarding, performance management, and professional development.
Develop engineers’ capabilities in software fundamentals, information retrieval, content APIs, and agentic system design.
Foster empowered ownership, technical decision-making, and accountability for production operations.
Explain complex content technology concepts and investment trade-offs to product managers, business leaders, and partner teams.
Model and reinforce AI-assisted development, targeting more than 50% of code being written with AI assistance.
Define engineering processes for shared infrastructure and production content capabilities, including testing, code review, and ongoing evaluation through offline IR grading pipelines and online signals.
Establish platform health and developer experience benchmarks, including reliability SLOs, client onboarding time-to-value, IR evaluation pass rates, and tool invocation accuracy.
Evaluate and integrate emerging tool protocols, including MCP, and retrieval patterns with attention to production readiness and operational implications.
Build strong working relationships with Labs, Product, and CoCounsel Engineering, engaging early in agentic workflow design.
Align the Content Tools roadmap with business priorities in CoCounsel Legal Next, Westlaw, and the wider Thomson Reuters product portfolio.

Benefits

Flexible hybrid working environment for office-based roles.
Work-from-anywhere flexibility for up to 8 weeks per year.
Career development and continuous learning programs.
Comprehensive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance.
401(k) plan with company match.
Flexible vacation and paid time off, including sick and safe time.
Two company-wide Mental Health Days off and access to the Headspace app.
Paid holidays.
Parental leave and sabbatical leave.
Annual bonus eligibility based on enterprise and individual performance.
Employee incentive programs.
Resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
Two paid volunteer days annually and opportunities for pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.
Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts.
Fitness reimbursement.
Employee Assistance Program.
Commuter benefits.
Adoption and surrogacy assistance.
Tuition reimbursement.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
Optional hospital, accident, sickness, life, and AD&D insurance.
Access to a 529 Plan.
Inclusion and belonging programs.