Senior Software Engineer, Search Platform

Thomson Reuters•Frisco, NY

18h•Hybrid

About The Position

The AI Enabled Software Engineering team at Thomson Reuters is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build and operate the core of its next-generation search platform. The platform consolidates search systems across Thomson Reuters products and services, serving millions of end users, internal agents, and search teams. It is designed to be fully managed, customizable, sovereign, and self-service, enabling internal teams to create, configure, and operate search systems independently. The role involves end-to-end ownership of production systems: designing, building, testing, deploying, and operating platform services and cloud infrastructure. The work spans document ingestion pipelines, search indexing, query APIs, and retrieval interfaces for products and AI agents. Engineers use AI-assisted development tools, continuously deliver to production, hold design authority within their assigned scope, share expertise, and mentor more junior engineers. The position also includes operational ownership through on-call participation, incident response, observability, and reliability improvements. Engineers collaborate with TR Labs, research scientists, and client teams to bring search capabilities into production and improve the platform based on user feedback. The role may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies.

Requirements

At least 5 years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend or data infrastructure systems, with end-to-end ownership of features and components.
A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Strong programming skills in at least one of Python, Java, Go, or an equivalent language, and judgment in selecting appropriate tools.
Solid distributed systems fundamentals, including understanding failure modes in queues, streaming pipelines, and distributed data stores and designing for them.
Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform; AWS is preferred.
Experience with infrastructure as code.
Operational ownership, including on-call, incident response, and observability.
Fluency with AI-assisted development tools.
Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Production experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Vespa, Solr, or another search engine, including query writing, index design, or cluster operations.
Experience with Kafka or another event-streaming platform.
Experience integrating AI services such as embedding, re-ranking, and RAG components, with sound error handling and fallbacks.
Exposure to agentic retrieval patterns, such as multi-hop search or designing tool interfaces for agents.
Familiarity with search evaluation and analytics, including relevance experiments and query-log analysis.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and test platform services for document ingestion, search indexing, and query APIs using an appropriate programming language.
Build reliable document-processing pipeline components for parsing, chunking, enrichment, and indexing, using retries, dead-letter queues, and idempotent processing.
Develop self-service APIs that allow client teams to configure search systems, manage index lifecycles, and monitor ingestion health.
Design retrieval interfaces for products and AI agents with predictable contracts, explicit latency budgets, and result payloads sized for LLM context windows.
Contribute to migration from OpenSearch to Vespa, including schema migrations and zero-downtime index promotion.
Instrument retrieval components to support offline evaluation and LLM-as-judge comparisons of pipeline versions and search quality.
Participate in the on-call rotation and own incidents from triage and root-cause analysis through post-mortems and systemic fixes.
Add logging, metrics, and distributed tracing to components, including trace-level visibility into agentic retrieval paths, and help define SLOs.
Improve delivery workflows by addressing slow deployments, flaky tests, and difficult local development workflows.
Use AI-assisted development tools and share effective practices.
Lead technical direction for assigned projects, translate customer and product requirements into executable work, and mentor junior engineers through reviews and pairing.
Collaborate with TR Labs and research scientists to productionize search capabilities such as embedding models, chunking strategies, and re-ranking in a tested and observable manner.
Work with client teams to understand platform usage and turn their feedback into platform improvements.
Ramp up on platform architecture and operations, take on on-call responsibility, and contribute production code within the first month.
Deliver a meaningful feature or reliability improvement with end-to-end ownership, from design through deployment and monitoring.
Own a significant platform component, monitor its health, and continually improve reliability and performance.
Build technical depth in at least one area—ingestion, indexing, query APIs, or infrastructure—and take on increasingly complex cross-functional work.
Strengthen engineering practices through code review, documentation, operational rigor, and mentoring.

Benefits

Flexible vacation and work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
Two company-wide Mental Health Days off and access to the Headspace app.
Retirement savings plan, including a competitive 401(k) plan with company match for eligible U.S. employees.
Tuition reimbursement.
Employee incentive programs; the role may also be eligible for an annual bonus based on enterprise and individual performance.
Health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs.
Paid holidays, sick and safe paid time off, parental leave, and sabbatical leave.
Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts.
Fitness reimbursement and access to an Employee Assistance Program.
Commuter benefits.
Adoption and surrogacy assistance.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
Two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities to participate in pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.
Optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance, optional life and AD&D insurance, group legal and identity theft protection, and access to a 529 Plan.