Staff Software Engineer, Search Retrieval Platform
Staff Software Engineer, Search Retrieval Platform
Our vision
We are building the next-generation search platform, with a vision to democratize knowledge construction and consumption at Thomson Reuters. The platform consolidates search systems across Thomson Reuters products and services, serving millions of end users, internal agents, and internal search teams, into a fully managed, customizable, sovereign, and self-serve search platform.
Job Description:
Advanced Content Engineering (ACE) is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to democratize retrieval at Thomson Reuters. You will build the platform capabilities that let any product team, research team, or AI agent get high-quality, customizable search without building it from scratch. That takes customer obsession: understanding what teams need, translating it into reusable platform capabilities, and making retrieval a fully customizable, plug-and-play service.
You will work closely with product, research engineering, and applied science partners. The scope spans APIs, search services, agents, evaluation and grading, and authentication and security, powering end customers, AI agents, and internal systems at enterprise scale. Staff Engineers here define, build, deploy, and operate what they ship. We ship to production constantly and use AI-assisted development as the norm.
Key Responsibilities:
- Turn customer and product needs into platform capabilities, working directly with product teams, client teams, and agent builders to learn what they need and where the platform gets in their way.
- Design the retrieval APIs and search services that serve end users, AI agents, and internal systems, with consistent contracts, tunable filtering and ranking, predictable latency, and result payloads built for agent context windows.
- Make retrieval customizable by design: pluggable components for chunking, enrichment, embedding, ranking, and custom models that teams can compose and tune through self-service APIs.
- Own how content is ingested and indexed on the platform (streaming pipelines, search engine configuration, zero-downtime index changes), so customization reaches all the way down the stack.
Partner across disciplines
- Partner with Research Engineering and Applied Science to take new retrieval techniques, such as embedding models, hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, and agentic patterns, from experiment to supported platform capability, with a clear path to production.
- Work with product and client teams to prioritize the roadmap, bring adoption feedback back into the platform, and reduce time-to-value for new adopters.
Quality, security, and trust
- Build evaluation into the platform: offline evaluation, search grading, LLM-as-judge scoring, and online experiments, so every change to retrieval can be measured.
- Own the security posture of retrieval: multi-tenant data isolation, entitlements enforced at query time, and telemetry that protects user content.
- Own SLOs, observability, and on-call for what you build, including tracing for agentic retrieval paths, and drive improvements from incident reviews.
Technical leadership
- Set architectural direction and design patterns across retrieval, search services, and the APIs teams build on, and act as the technical authority others turn to.
- Lead cross-team initiatives, set priorities, and make hard trade-offs between near-term product needs and the long-term platform.
- Mentor Senior and mid-level engineers, and help the team use AI-assisted development effectively.
Required Qualifications:
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with progression to staff-level scope, including ownership of a functional area and cross-functional leadership. A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Experience building search, retrieval, or data-intensive platforms at scale, with strong distributed systems fundamentals, in a language such as Python, Java, or Go
- Track record translating customer needs into platform capabilities, working across product, engineering, and science
- Experience designing APIs and services consumed by multiple teams, with attention to contracts, versioning, and developer experience
- Operational rigor: SLOs, observability, on-call ownership, and learning from incidents
- Fluency with AI-assisted development tools
Preferred qualifications:
- Production experience with search engines such as Vespa, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch
- Experience with hybrid (dense and sparse) retrieval, ranking, and embedding pipelines
- Experience building tools or APIs for AI agents, including agentic retrieval patterns and protocols such as MCP
- Search evaluation experience: relevance metrics, LLM-as-judge, and online experimentation
- Multi-tenant authentication, authorization, and entitlements
- Experience operationalizing ML models in production, including serving, promotion, and monitoring
What Success Looks Like
In the first 90 days
- Learn the platform's retrieval, indexing, and API architecture and its known gaps
- Build relationships with product, research, and client teams, and understand their top pain points firsthand
- Take on-call ownership for your area and deliver one meaningful improvement to retrieval quality, reliability, or customizability
In the first year
- Deliver a customizable retrieval capability that a client team adopts and configures on its own, without platform team involvement
- Establish evaluation coverage, SLOs, and runbooks for the retrieval stack
- Move at least one research innovation from experiment to supported platform capability
- Become the recognized technical authority for retrieval on the platform, shaping standards and advising leadership
#LI-SM2
This posting is for proactive recruitment purposes and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies within our organization.What’s in it For You?
- Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment 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.
About Us
Thomson Reuters informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. We serve professionals across legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media. Our products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions, and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a world leading provider of trusted journalism and news.
We are powered by the talents of 26,000 employees across more than 70 countries, where everyone has a chance to contribute and grow professionally in flexible work environments. At a time when objectivity, accuracy, fairness, and transparency are under attack, we consider it our duty to pursue them. Sound exciting? Join us and help shape the industries that move society forward.
As a global business, we rely on the unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of all employees to deliver on our business goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. Thomson Reuters is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer providing a drug-free workplace.
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