Staff Software Engineer
About The Position
Thomson Reuters is seeking a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer AI) for the CoCounsel team, which develops the next generation of AI agentic products for legal professionals. The team turns early Labs concepts into scalable, production-ready product features and is moving toward an AI-native engineering organization in which AI accelerates development while engineers provide technical leadership, architecture, and judgment. The role is responsible for the technical direction and delivery of CoCounsel Legal’s Litigation Drafting products and provides technical leadership to a team of front-end and back-end engineers. The engineer will partner with an Engineering Manager and cross-functional colleagues to build agentic legal software, guide architecture and technical strategy, and deliver reliable AI capabilities in a fast-paced environment. The work includes designing and building backend services with Python, FastAPI, and PostgreSQL; contributing to agentic workflows, LLM orchestration, and content pipelines; and supporting a complex agentic user interface using SSE, AG-UI, Claude Agent SDK, and AgentCore. The role also involves productionizing integrations with LLM providers, establishing guardrails and observability, improving CI/CD and DevOps automation, and ensuring AI systems meet quality, security, ethical, and regulatory expectations.
Requirements
- At least 7 years of software engineering experience.
- At least 2 years in technical leadership roles.
- At least 3 years building scalable cloud applications, APIs, and AI-enabled products.
- Proven record of shipping production-grade AI systems to customers, including deployment, monitoring, evaluation, scaling, and ongoing operational ownership in enterprise environments.
- Strong proficiency in Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and AWS or Azure cloud services.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, architecture, and data modelling.
- Experience building and owning CI/CD pipelines for production web applications, using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CodePipeline, or similar, including automated testing and safe release practices.
- Strong leadership and mentoring experience.
- Strategic thinking and problem-solving skills.
- Strong cross-functional communication skills and ability to work in fast-paced, iterative environments.
- Strong product sense and ability to work from ambiguous requirements.
- Outstanding communication and presentation skills, with experience influencing senior stakeholders.
Nice To Haves
- BA or BS in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
- Strong knowledge of vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, and information retrieval.
- Hands-on experience with the AG-UI protocol or comparable agent-UI protocols and SDKs.
- Strong proficiency in SSE events.
- Knowledge of backend streaming patterns, including Node and Python/FastAPI, sufficient to debug end to end.
- Experience with Datadog (logs/RUM/traces), CloudWatch Log Insights, and Braintrust.
- Prior experience working on products for legal, compliance, or other regulated professional domains.
Responsibilities
- Build and architect AI agentic systems in partnership with the Engineering Manager and full-stack team.
- Lead technical strategy, experimentation, testing, rollout practices, and operational excellence.
- Design and build backend services using Python, FastAPI, and PostgreSQL to support real-time AI agent interactions.
- Contribute to AI-powered capabilities, including agentic workflows, LLM orchestration, and content pipelines.
- Define service boundaries, system interfaces, and scalable design patterns for the AI platform.
- Support front-end engineers building an agentic UI using SSE, AG-UI, Claude Agent SDK, and AgentCore at runtime.
- Lead evaluation and adoption of AI techniques, oversee proof-of-concept work and technical feasibility, and translate AI research into technical roadmaps.
- Lead architecture decisions and translate business requirements into scalable technical specifications.
- Mentor senior and junior software engineers.
- Design and implement testing, monitoring, and observability for AI systems at scale.
- Lead compliance with ethical AI principles, security standards, and regulatory requirements.
- Partner with Labs, product managers, designers, and other engineering leaders to turn early AI concepts into scalable production features and maintain consistency across teams.
- Integrate modern LLM providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, implementing orchestration, routing, error handling, guardrails, telemetry, and observability for performance and reliability.
- Strengthen CI/CD pipelines and DevOps automation for fast, stable, cloud-native development workflows.
- Own production AI systems, including deployment, monitoring, evaluation, scaling, and ongoing operational support.
Benefits
- Flexible vacation and flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
- Two company-wide Mental Health Days off annually.
- Access to the Headspace app and Employee Assistance Program.
- Retirement savings plan with company match.
- 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.
- Paid holidays and parental leave.
- Sabbatical leave.
- Optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance; optional life and AD&D insurance.
- Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts.
- Fitness reimbursement.
- Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit.
- Access to a 529 Plan.
- Commuter benefits.
- Adoption and Surrogacy Assistance.
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
- Two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities for pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.
- Resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
