Director, Forward Deployed Solutions (AI)
Job Description
Thomson Reuters is seeking a Director, Forward Deployed Solutions (AI) to lead a customer-facing Professional Services function that helps customers adopt and realize value from AI-enabled legal, tax, and professional-information solutions.
This leader will manage a team of senior solutions professionals aligned to Legal and Tax workflows and will be accountable for the operating model that supports high-quality customer engagements. The role owns the connection between customer demand, engagement shaping, delivery capacity, financial performance, customer outcomes, and the development of repeatable solution patterns.
This is a business and people leadership role within Forward Deployed Services. You will establish an operating rhythm for the team, guide prioritization and resource decisions, improve delivery quality and commercial discipline, and partner closely with Product, Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, Finance, and other stakeholders.
You will help ensure that customer-specific work delivers measurable value while creating reusable assets, delivery approaches, and product feedback that can improve future deployments and inform core product roadmaps. You will not be expected to personally own every aspect of AI strategy, product management, architecture, and services operations; instead, you will bring strong services leadership and commercial judgment while working with subject-matter experts across the organization.
Key Responsibilities
Lead the Forward Deployed Solutions team, including senior solutions professionals supporting Legal and Tax customer engagements.
Establish a clear operating model for intake, prioritization, staffing, delivery governance, escalation management, customer outcomes, and portfolio reporting.
Own the annual operating plan for the function, including demand assumptions, capacity, utilization, budget, delivery cost, investment needs, and financial performance.
Use pipeline, backlog, staffing, utilization, delivery, and customer-health data to make effective resourcing decisions and improve the predictability and efficiency of the services portfolio.
Partner with Sales, account teams, and commercial leaders to shape strategic customer opportunities and ensure engagements have clear scope, assumptions, estimates, acceptance criteria, delivery plans, and change-control expectations.
Support executive-level customer discovery, solution discussions, and steering forums for complex or high-value engagements.
Ensure a strong connection between commercial pipeline and delivery capacity, identifying staffing or capability constraints early and recommending practical build, buy, borrow, or partner approaches.
Establish and maintain operating standards for discovery, solution design, engagement planning, delivery readiness, documentation, handoff, customer adoption, and value realization.
Lead resolution and recovery efforts for complex, at-risk, or escalated customer engagements. Coordinate cross-functional action plans that protect customer relationships and improve delivery outcomes.
Coach, develop, and retain a high-performing team. Set clear expectations, provide feedback, support career growth, and build a strong leadership and succession bench.
Partner with Product and Engineering leaders to ensure customer-deployment insights, recurring workflow needs, and product gaps are communicated clearly and incorporated into roadmap and investment discussions.
Identify opportunities to convert successful customer work into repeatable delivery patterns, reusable accelerators, implementation playbooks, or packaged services.
Balance customer-specific commitments with opportunities to improve repeatability, scalability, delivery quality, and long-term commercial value.
Establish a consistent view of portfolio health, including pipeline, backlog, capacity, utilization, engagement status, delivery risks, customer outcomes, financial performance, and key dependencies.
Lead regular business reviews and communicate clear recommendations, tradeoffs, performance trends, risks, and investment needs to senior leadership.
Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, inclusion, continuous improvement, and customer focus across the Forward Deployed Solutions organization.
Partner with relevant technical, product, security, and domain experts to ensure solutions are delivered responsibly and in accordance with applicable quality, security, and AI governance expectations.
Required Qualifications
10+ years of progressive experience in Professional Services, solutions delivery, consulting, customer success, implementation, enterprise software, digital transformation, or related customer-facing technology environments.
5+ years of people leadership experience, including leading senior professionals, managers, consultants, solution architects, delivery leaders, or multidisciplinary customer-facing teams.
Demonstrated experience leading a Professional Services, consulting, implementation, or solutions-delivery function with accountability for capacity, utilization, delivery quality, customer outcomes, and operational performance.
Experience managing services financials, including budgets, forecasts, staffing plans, utilization, delivery costs, margins, or investment trade-offs.
Experience shaping complex enterprise engagements from discovery through scope definition, estimation, delivery planning, change control, customer adoption, and value realization.
Proven ability to partner effectively with Sales and commercial teams while maintaining appropriate delivery discipline, scope clarity, and customer-outcome focus.
Experience managing complex customer escalations, delivery risks, competing priorities, and cross-functional dependencies in a fast-moving environment.
Strong executive communication and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to influence customers, commercial leaders, Product, Engineering, Finance, and senior internal stakeholders.
Demonstrated ability to lead, coach, develop, and retain senior talent; set performance expectations; and build consistent team practices.
Experience creating or improving operational processes, portfolio governance, reporting, delivery standards, or services-management practices.
Familiarity with enterprise SaaS, workflow platforms, data integrations, AI-enabled products, or other complex technology solutions.
Familiarity with legal, tax, accounting, compliance, or other professional workflows where accuracy, trust, security, and domain expertise are important.
Preferred Qualifications
Direct ownership of a Professional Services P&L, including revenue, margin, forecasting, utilization, delivery economics, and investment planning.
Experience leading services, solutions, or implementation teams that support generative AI, agentic workflows, AI-enabled products, or data-intensive enterprise platforms.
Experience in legal technology, tax technology, accounting technology, regulatory technology, professional-information services, or another highly regulated industry.
Experience working in customer co-innovation, forward-deployed, strategic implementation, solutions consulting, or partner-enabled delivery models.
Experience defining reusable delivery methodologies, accelerators, implementation playbooks, packaged services, or service offerings.
Experience partnering with Product Management and Engineering teams to translate customer-deployment insights into product feedback, roadmap recommendations, or scalable platform capabilities.
Experience with workforce planning, partner strategy, contingent-resource models, or build-buy-borrow decisions in a Professional Services environment.
Experience leading distributed teams across multiple locations, customer segments, or professional domains.
Experience operating within a large, matrixed global organization.
Experience with responsible AI, AI governance, quality validation, security, privacy, or risk-management practices for enterprise AI-enabled solutions.
Experience with legal, tax, accounting, or compliance workflows is beneficial but not required.
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.
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.Thomson Reuters complies with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. The base compensation range varies across locations. Eligible office location(s) for this role include one or more of the following: New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and/or Irvine, CA; McLean, VA; Washington, DC. The base compensation range for the role in any of those locations is $158,100 USD - $293,500 USD. For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $137,200 USD - $254,800 USD. Base pay is positioned within the range based on several factors including an individual’s knowledge, skills and experience with consideration given to internal equity. Base pay is one part of a comprehensive Total Reward program which also includes flexible and supportive benefits and other wellbeing programs. This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.
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.
Thomson Reuters makes reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities, including veterans with disabilities, and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. If you reside in the United States and require an accommodation in the recruiting process, you may contact our Human Resources Department at [email protected]. Disability accommodations in the recruiting process may include things like a sign language interpreter, making interview rooms accessible, providing assistive technology, or other relevant accommodations. Please note this email is not intended for general recruitment questions and we will promptly respond to inquiries regarding accommodations. More information on requesting an accommodation here.
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More information about Thomson Reuters can be found on thomsonreuters.com