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

Thomson Reuters•Washington, DC

1d•$94,900 - $203,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Software Engineer - AI (Legal) – CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering Are you excited about building AI solutions that help legal professionals work faster, smarter, and with greater confidence? Do you enjoy operating at the intersection of engineering, legal workflows, and real-world client problems? Join Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering team — a high-impact group focused on delivering practical legal AI solutions to law firms and corporate legal departments. With one million professionals relying on CoCounsel across 107 countries, the work you do here will have meaningful impact. What You'll Be Part Of Over 20,000 law firms and corporate legal departments, along with the majority of top US courts and Am Law 100 firms, already trust CoCounsel. The Forward Deployed Engineering team works directly on high-value, real-world legal AI problems — partnering closely with clients and internal teams to shape how AI is adopted in legal practice. If you want to help build AI systems that legal professionals can trust in important moments of their work, this is the team. About the Role As a Software Engineer - AI (Legal), You will partner with AI Solution Engineers, Architects, and senior technical teammates to design, build, and deploy AI-powered solutions for legal customers. You will help translate legal workflows and business needs into reliable technical solutions that combine foundation models, proprietary AI capabilities, and legal-domain understanding. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys hands-on engineering, client-facing problem solving, and applied AI development. You will contribute to technical discovery, solution delivery, prototyping, integrations, and evaluation of AI outputs for legal use cases. You will play an important role in ensuring the systems we deploy are practical, accurate, secure, and aligned with the high standards required in legal environments.

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

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.
Help 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

Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role) for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connected.
Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: Flex My Way is a set of supportive workplace policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities, whether caring for family, giving back to the community, or finding time to refresh and reset. This builds upon our flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, empowering employees to achieve a better work-life balance.
Career Development and Growth: By fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development, we prepare our talent to tackle tomorrow’s challenges and deliver real-world solutions. Our Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.
Industry Competitive Benefits: We offer comprehensive benefit plans to include flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, access to the Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, employee incentive programs, and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
Culture: Globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more. We live by our values: Obsess over our Customers, Compete to Win, Challenge (Y)our Thinking, Act Fast / Learn Fast, and Stronger Together.
Social Impact: Make an impact in your community with our Social Impact Institute. We offer employees two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.
Making a Real-World Impact: We are one of the few companies globally that helps its customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency. Together, with the professionals and institutions we serve, we help uphold the rule of law, turn the wheels of commerce, catch bad actors, report the facts, and provide trusted, unbiased information to people all over the world.
In the United States, Thomson Reuters offers a comprehensive benefits package to our employees. Our benefit package includes market competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs, as well as a competitive 401k plan with company match. In addition, Thomson Reuters offers market leading work life benefits with competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off, paid holidays (including two company mental health days off), parental leave, sabbatical leave. These benefits meet or exceeds the requirements of paid time off in accordance with any applicable state or municipal laws. Finally, Thomson Reuters offers the following additional benefits: 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; Tuition Reimbursement; and access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

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