Software Engineer - AI (Legal) – CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering

Thomson Reuters•Washington, DC

8d•$94,900 - $203,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering team is seeking a Software Engineer - AI (Legal) to build AI solutions that assist legal professionals. This role involves operating at the intersection of engineering, legal workflows, and client problems, delivering practical legal AI solutions to law firms and corporate legal departments. The Forward Deployed Engineering team works directly on high-value, real-world legal AI problems, partnering closely with clients and internal teams to shape AI adoption in legal practice. The ideal candidate will help build AI systems that legal professionals can trust in important moments of their work.

Requirements

JD, formal legal training, or meaningful experience working in legal practice, legal operations, legal technology, or closely related environments.
Familiarity with legal terminology and interest in legal workflows and legal AI applications.
2–4 years of software engineering experience, including experience building applications or integrations in production environments.
Hands-on experience with Python and familiarity with modern AI/ML tooling and APIs.
Understanding of core machine learning and LLM concepts, including prompt design, evaluation, and workflow orchestration.
Experience integrating external APIs, automating workflows, or building data pipelines.
Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams, including legal, product, and engineering stakeholders.
Comfortable working in fast-paced environments, learning quickly, and contributing across multiple projects.

Nice To Haves

Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Familiarity with containerization, deployment workflows, and modern software development practices.
Experience using AI platforms or APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar providers.
Exposure to vector databases, embeddings, search, or retrieval systems.
Experience working on AI solutions in legal, compliance, financial, healthcare, or other regulated/professional domains.
Portfolio or project examples demonstrating practical use of LLMs, automations, or applied AI systems.

Responsibilities

Partner with AI Solution Engineers, Architects, and senior technical teammates to design, build, and deploy AI-powered solutions for legal customers.
Translate legal workflows and business needs into reliable technical solutions combining foundation models, proprietary AI capabilities, and legal-domain understanding.
Contribute to technical discovery, solution delivery, prototyping, integrations, and evaluation of AI outputs for legal use cases.
Ensure deployed systems are practical, accurate, secure, and aligned with high standards required in legal environments.
Support client engagements by participating in technical discovery sessions, gathering requirements, and helping scope legal AI use cases.
Work with legal and technical stakeholders to understand workflows, pain points, and desired outcomes.
Assist with demonstrations, proofs of concept, and early-stage prototypes that inform solution design.
Develop working knowledge of legal terminology, legal processes, and operational constraints in law firms and corporate legal departments.
Design, develop, and implement AI-powered solutions for legal workflows such as contract review, litigation support, discovery automation, and regulatory analysis.
Build and support retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, agentic workflows, and other multi-component AI systems.
Configure and integrate solutions using CoCounsel, Westlaw, Practical Law, and other enterprise platforms where applicable.
Develop automation scripts, APIs, and integration components tailored to customer environments and use cases.
Collaborate with senior engineers and architects to ensure solutions are scalable, maintainable, and secure.
Evaluate LLM outputs for legal accuracy, relevance, citation quality, consistency, and hallucination risk.
Contribute to test cases, benchmarks, and evaluation workflows based on real legal tasks.
Partner with internal teams to validate new capabilities against real-world legal use cases.
Support compliance with responsible AI principles, data privacy requirements, and enterprise security standards.
Translate functional requirements into technical tasks and contribute to implementation planning.
Document solutions, reusable components, and engineering best practices for internal use.
Experiment with prompting strategies, workflow improvements, and emerging AI techniques to improve legal use-case performance.
Stay current with developments in AI engineering, legal technology, and applied LLM systems.

Benefits

Flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role)
Flex My Way policies
Work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year
Continuous learning and skill development opportunities
Grow My Way programming
Skills-first approach to career growth
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
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