Senior Manager, Software Engineering -Search Platform

Thomson Reuters•Frisco, TX

1d•$118,400 - $219,800•Hybrid

About The Position

The CoCounsel Legal Integrations team is seeking a Senior Manager, Software Engineering to lead the engineering team responsible for building, operating, and evolving the shared search platform at Thomson Reuters. This platform is the foundation of TR’s search capability — a managed, self-service infrastructure that allows internal client teams to configure, deploy, and iterate on production search systems in days rather than months, accelerating the delivery of high-quality search experiences across TR’s legal, tax, and professional products. The team owns what it builds — defining, building, testing, deploying, scaling, and operating search infrastructure end-to-end. The Senior Manager is responsible for growing this team from its current early stage into a high-performing, product-minded engineering organization that ships to production constantly, treats delivery friction as the first problem worth solving, and holds itself to the same reliability and developer-experience standards as any best-in-class external search platform. The successful candidate brings deep systems and platform thinking, strong people leadership, and the credibility to make hard architectural calls alongside world-class engineers and research scientists.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a technical leadership or engineering management role
Demonstrated experience designing and operating large-scale distributed data systems — event streaming, data pipelines, or search/indexing infrastructure — at production scale
Strong platform and systems thinking: a track record of building shared infrastructure consumed by multiple teams, with a product mindset toward developer experience and internal customer satisfaction
Experience leading teams that own their production systems end-to-end — including on-call responsibilities, SLO management, and incident response — with a clear philosophy that building and operating are inseparable
Proven ability to build high-velocity engineering teams: reducing delivery friction, enabling constant production deployments, and embedding AI-assisted development practices as a team norm
Advanced knowledge of distributed systems design, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), API design, and software architecture
Proficiency in Python and strong software engineering fundamentals, including DevOps practices and observability
Familiarity with information retrieval, search systems, or vector/hybrid search concepts sufficient to make sound architectural decisions and partner effectively with search engineers and research scientists
Awareness of AI ethics, governance, and responsible technology deployment
Strong leadership skills: proficiency in agile methodologies, excellent communication, and the ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and science teams

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with search engines such as Vespa, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or Solr
Experience building multi-tenant platform infrastructure with strong data isolation, customer-managed encryption, or other enterprise security requirements
Background in event-driven architectures and stream processing frameworks (Kafka, MSK, or similar)
Experience partnering with AI/ML research teams to operationalize retrieval models, embedding pipelines, or re-ranking systems

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end platform engineering roadmap — spanning document ingestion and processing, search engine management, query APIs, platform control-plane APIs, and the cloud infrastructure that ties them together — balancing new capability delivery with rigorous management of reliability and technical debt
Drive API-first, self-service architectural thinking: ensure that every capability the platform delivers is accessible via a clean, versioned, well-documented API, and that internal client teams can configure and operate search systems without direct involvement from the platform team
Lead the migration from current search infrastructure to the platform’s strategic search engine, including Vespa adoption, while maintaining zero-downtime operations on existing production systems throughout the transition
Champion full-stack operational ownership across the team: the team defines, builds, tests, deploys, scales, and operates what it ships — establishing on-call rotations, incident response practices, SLO definitions, and reliability engineering as first-class team responsibilities, not afterthoughts
Build a team culture where AI-assisted development is the default and delivery friction is identified and eliminated aggressively — ensuring the team ships to production constantly and that process or tooling obstacles are treated as urgent engineering problems
Partner closely with TR Labs to ensure that new retrieval techniques, embedding models, re-ranking approaches, and agentic search patterns have a clear, well-supported path from prototype to production within the platform’s architecture — including the infrastructure required to serve custom models in production with appropriate latency SLOs, versioning, and rollback capability
Oversee platform infrastructure including event streaming (Kafka/MSK), cloud services (AWS), observability tooling, and security controls including multi-tenant data isolation and customer-controlled encryption
Build and lead a team of approximately 10 software engineers (including Staff and Senior levels), managing hiring, onboarding, performance, and professional development with a focus on cultivating deep technical ownership
Develop engineers who bring together distributed systems depth, search domain expertise, and a strong sense of operational responsibility — engineers who own their work from the first line of code to the production dashboard
Foster a culture of empowered ownership — where engineers have the autonomy to define the problem, the authority to push back on poor technical decisions, and the accountability to carry work from design through production operations
Translate complex platform and search concepts to non-technical stakeholders — making the value and trade-offs of platform investments legible to product managers and business leaders
Balance the team’s platform engineering responsibilities with direct search solution delivery for CoCounsel’s highest-priority use cases
Define and maintain engineering processes for a team that both builds shared platform infrastructure and delivers production search solutions — ensuring rigorous testing, code review, reliability standards, and continuous evaluation of search quality through both offline grading pipelines and online signals such as query performance monitoring, A/B experiments, and engagement analytics
Establish platform health and developer-experience benchmarks — including API reliability SLOs, client onboarding time-to-value, and search quality metrics — and use them to drive continuous improvement
Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies — search engines, vector databases, streaming frameworks, AI development tooling, agentic retrieval patterns, orchestration tools — with a clear-eyed assessment of production-readiness and operational implications
Cultivate a strong, productive partnership with TR Labs — engaging early in the research and experimentation lifecycle to shape platform requirements, co-develop integration patterns, and ensure that promising AI capabilities have a clear and well-supported path to production
Collaborate closely with product management, TR Labs, and consuming engineering teams to align the platform roadmap with business priorities across CoCounsel, Westlaw, and the broader TR product portfolio

Benefits

Hybrid Work Model
Flexibility & Work-Life Balance (including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year)
Career Development and Growth (Grow My Way programming)
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 (including two company mental health days off)
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
Access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan