Senior Legal Engineer, CoCounsel FDE

Thomson Reuters•Frisco, TX

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Thomson Reuters is hiring a Senior Legal Engineer for the CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering team to build AI-powered solutions for legal professionals. The role works directly with legal customers and cross-functional teams to design, build, and improve software and AI solutions for legal workflows, translating customer needs into secure, scalable, high-quality products. Travel to customer sites may be required. The position combines software engineering expertise with legal-domain fluency. The engineer develops production-grade software, assesses AI and LLM solutions for legal use cases, and contributes to reliable cloud-native systems and secure deployments. The role also includes mentoring junior engineers and collaborating with engineering, product, legal, and design partners. This posting is for proactive recruitment and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies. The role uses a hybrid work model for office-based positions. Eligible office locations include New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Irvine, McLean, Washington, DC, and Ontario, Canada. Compensation varies by location. The role may also be eligible for an annual bonus based on enterprise and individual performance.

Requirements

A JD, formal legal training, or equivalent depth of experience in a legal-practice environment.
Fluency in legal terminology and experience working directly with or alongside legal teams.
5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Strong proficiency in Python and experience building production-grade software.
Experience designing and delivering distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and cloud-native applications.
Strong knowledge of AI and LLM evaluation methodologies.
Advanced prompt-engineering skills, including designing, testing, iterating, and optimizing prompts for legal-domain use cases.
Experience evaluating AI-generated outputs for legal accuracy, relevance, reliability, and safety.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to engage credibly with lawyers and engineers.
Ability to work independently, navigate ambiguity, and present in client workshops or knowledge-sharing sessions.
A collaborative, growth-oriented mindset and commitment to secure engineering, ethical AI, privacy, and confidentiality.

Nice To Haves

Python scripting experience.
Experience with legal technology platforms, legal SaaS products, or AI-enabled legal workflows.
Experience building or evaluating AI tools for specific legal practice areas, such as transactional work, litigation, compliance, or intake.
Experience with Thomson Reuters legal products or comparable legal AI platforms.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, test, and deploy end-to-end software solutions for complex legal workflows and AI-enabled products.
Work directly with legal customers to understand needs, workflows, and challenges, and translate requirements into scalable technical solutions.
Architect and build cloud-native systems using distributed services, microservices, APIs, containerization, and orchestration technologies.
Develop production-grade Python software using strong practices for security, testing, reliability, and maintainability.
Evaluate AI and LLM solutions for legal use cases, assessing outputs for legal accuracy, relevance, reliability, and usability.
Design, iterate, and optimize advanced prompts for specialized legal-domain tasks.
Apply DevOps and Infrastructure as Code practices to support secure, reliable, automated deployments.
Manage technical debt while balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term scalability and system health.
Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, coaching, and knowledge sharing.
Collaborate with engineering, product, legal, and design partners to prioritize work, manage delivery commitments, and improve the software development lifecycle.

Benefits

Flexible vacation and work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
Two company-wide mental health days off.
Access to the Headspace app.
Retirement savings plan with company match.
Tuition reimbursement.
Employee incentive programs.
Resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
Paid volunteer days and opportunities for pro-bono consulting projects and ESG initiatives.
Health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance.
Paid holidays and 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.
Optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance, optional life and AD&D insurance, and group legal identity theft protection.