Principal Software Engineer / Architect – AI – Legal FDE

Thomson Reuters•Washington, DC

1d•$158,900 - $340,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Thomson Reuters is seeking a recognized technical authority to set the direction for how law firms and corporate legal departments adopt AI. As the senior-most individual contributor on the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, this role defines and drives the technology strategy and roadmap for designing, building, and operating bespoke AI solutions. The position owns the team’s most complex, highest-risk, and most strategically important engagements, partnering with engineering, product, and business leadership to align FDE work with CoCounsel’s long-term objectives. This is a hands-on technical leadership position with broad influence. It makes high-stakes architectural decisions, raises engineering standards across teams, and helps establish AI-native practices. The role leads complex AI initiatives from concept through production, shapes reusable solutions and engineering standards, and supports client engagements by translating legal and technical needs into secure, scalable AI systems. The position is hybrid for office-based roles. Eligible locations include New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Irvine, McLean, and Washington, DC, with other eligible US locations also referenced. Compensation depends on location: the stated base range is $183,100–$340,000 for certain listed locations and $158,900–$295,100 for other eligible US locations. The role may also be eligible for an annual bonus.

Requirements

12 or more years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in system design, distributed systems, and architecture, and a track record of leading highly complex, high-risk projects.
Extensive experience owning technical requirements and strategy, setting technology roadmaps, and prioritizing competing features and investments.
Expert-level, hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML and LLM-powered applications in production.
Deep proficiency with orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI, or AutoGen, and expert understanding of RAG architectures and vector databases.
Hands-on experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) patterns for interoperable, tool-augmented AI systems.
Expert Python skills, including FastAPI or equivalent, and strong experience with RESTful, asynchronous, and event-driven architectures.
Experience with a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, CDK, or equivalent.
Production observability experience using Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or similar, and experience with AI evaluation platforms such as LangSmith, Langfuse, Braintrust, or W&B.
Strong background in secure API development using OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and JWT.
Fluency with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, and a track record of driving AI-native engineering practices.
Ability to influence across teams and domains, advise senior leadership, and communicate complex ideas at multiple organizational levels.
Autonomy, sound judgment, comfort with ambiguity in a fast-paced agile environment, and strong attention to detail.
Recognition as a technical role model and leader in the field.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a regulated industry such as legal, fintech, or healthcare, including familiarity with compliance and data privacy requirements.
Experience building agentic AI systems with autonomous decision-making.
Familiarity with legal platforms, document management systems, and legal technology ecosystems.
Experience with container orchestration using Docker/Kubernetes and MLOps/LLMOps lifecycle management.
Understanding of transformer model scaling, limitations, and fine-tuning.
External presence through conference talks, publications, patents, open-source contributions, or standards participation.
Experience developing vision documents and leading cross-business-unit technology strategy.

Responsibilities

Define and drive FDE’s long-term technical vision, strategy, technology requirements, and roadmaps aligned with product and business objectives.
Lead the selection, evaluation, and adoption of technologies, frameworks, and patterns, building consensus across teams.
Identify opportunities and trade-offs associated with emerging technologies, including agentic systems, MCP and A2A interoperability, and new model and orchestration patterns, and communicate them to senior leadership.
Contribute to cross-functional and cross-business-unit engineering strategy and standards, and to patents where appropriate.
Lead complex, high-risk, high-visibility AI initiatives from concept through production, participating hands-on in design, prototyping, and code for the hardest problems.
Architect scalable, secure AI systems that integrate with client environments, including document management systems, enterprise platforms, and legal technology ecosystems.
Design RAG pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, event-driven backends, and agentic workflows using CoCounsel, Westlaw, Practical Law, and third-party AI APIs.
Build reusable AI components, frameworks, and solution templates to scale delivery across the team.
Set MLOps/LLMOps, Infrastructure as Code, and CI/CD standards to make delivery secure, repeatable, and fast.
Identify weaknesses in existing designs and drive remedies.
Set the strategy for AI monitoring and observability, covering performance, output quality, latency, cost, and production reliability risk.
Own LLM evaluation, including accuracy, hallucination risk, citation quality, A/B testing, and red-teaming, and define quality benchmarks grounded in real legal workflows.
Ensure solutions meet ethical AI, data protection, and enterprise security requirements.
Drive operational excellence across the software development lifecycle, including post-launch measurement.
Serve as the senior technical voice in discovery for high-value engagements, scoping use cases, shaping architectures, and building credibility with legal and technical executives.
Present technical concepts and strategy to engineering and business audiences, and negotiate solutions among key stakeholders.
Work with legal subject matter experts to translate professional reasoning and domain heuristics into pipeline design, evaluation criteria, and benchmarks.
Anticipate customer and market needs and feed field insights into the product roadmap.
Mentor and coach Staff, Senior, and Lead engineers, and indirectly lead a small team of engineers and technical experts on ambiguous problems.
Review architecture and design at team and sub-unit levels and provide authoritative feedback.
Strengthen engineering culture through knowledge sharing and championing AI-native tools and practices.
Work with program and project managers to incorporate technical considerations into status and risk reporting, and consult on budgets for large programs where applicable.
Represent Thomson Reuters externally through speaking, publications, community engagement, open-source work, or standards participation.

Benefits

Flexible hybrid work arrangements for office-based roles, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
Flexible vacation.
Two company-wide Mental Health Days off annually.
Access to the Headspace app.
Retirement savings plan with company match.
Tuition reimbursement.
Employee incentive programs, with possible annual bonus eligibility based on enterprise and individual performance.
Health insurance.
Dental insurance.
Vision insurance.
Disability insurance.
Life insurance.
Paid holidays.
Parental leave.
Sabbatical leave.
Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts.
Fitness reimbursement.
Employee Assistance Program.
Commuter benefits.
Adoption and surrogacy assistance.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
Two paid volunteer days off annually.
Resources and programs for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.