Senior Software Engineer, Search Platform

Thomson Reuters•Frisco, TX

2d•$117,700 - $218,600•Hybrid

About The Position

The AI Enabled Software Engineering team at Thomson Reuters is building a next-generation search platform that consolidates search systems across its products and services. The platform is intended to serve millions of end users, internal agents, and search teams through a managed, customizable, self-service system. The Senior Software Engineer will build ingestion pipelines, APIs, and cloud infrastructure that enable internal teams to configure and operate search independently. This is a full-ownership role involving the design, development, testing, deployment, and operation of production systems at scale. Engineers ship frequently, improve delivery processes, and use AI-assisted development tools. Senior engineers hold design authority within their scope, share expertise across the team, and mentor less experienced engineers.

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 Python, Java, Go, or an equivalent language, and judgment in choosing the right tool for the job.
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 a search engine such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Vespa, or Solr, including writing queries, designing indexes, or operating clusters.
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 appropriate programming languages.
Develop reliable document-processing pipelines for parsing, chunking, enrichment, and indexing, using retries, dead-letter queues, and idempotent processing.
Build self-service APIs for configuring search systems, managing index lifecycles, and monitoring ingestion health.
Design retrieval interfaces for products and AI agents with predictable contracts, latency budgets, and results 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 through triage, root-cause analysis, 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.
Identify and remove delivery friction, including slow deployments, flaky tests, and difficult local workflows; use AI-assisted 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.
Work with client teams to understand platform usage and turn feedback into improvements.

Benefits

Flexible hybrid work environment for office-based roles.
Work-from-anywhere flexibility for up to 8 weeks per year.
Flexible vacation and paid time off, including paid holidays and two company-wide mental health days.
Access to the Headspace app.
Retirement savings plan with company match.
Tuition reimbursement.
Employee incentive programs and an employee stock purchase plan.
Health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance.
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.
Two paid volunteer days annually and opportunities for pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.
Annual bonus may be available based on enterprise and individual performance.