Lead AI Forward Engineer

The Lead AI Forward Engineer designs and guides the delivery of AI-powered solutions that reduce operational toil and accelerate technology teams across the CIO organization. This role operates as a forward-deployed solution architect and engineer, partnering closely with teams to identify opportunities, design end-to-end architectures, and drive implementations to production.

You will own solution design from concept through deployment, ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable, and extensible. You will evaluate emerging AI technologies, define repeatable patterns, and help build new capabilities through hands-on implementation, mentorship, and shared standards.

About the role:

Solution Architecture and Delivery

• Identify high-impact opportunities to apply AI automation and intelligent agents across CIO technology teams.
• Design end-to-end AI solutions, including workflows, integration patterns, data flows, and operational considerations.
• Guide implementation from prototype to production, ensuring solutions meet reliability, security, and compliance expectations.
• Define reusable architectural patterns and reference designs to enable broader adoption across teams.
• Build scalable pipelines to collect and analyze inference- and workflow-level telemetry, integrating with TR's data backbone.
• Develop dashboards and reports providing clear visibility into performance, reliability, safety, and cost.
• Ensure compliance with TR's AI standards for monitoring, governance, privacy, and auditability.

AI System Design and Technology Strategy

• Evaluate and recommend AI/ML technologies and platforms (LLM orchestration, agentic frameworks, cloud AI services) based on capability, cost, risk, and fit.
• Design flexible architectures that can evolve with model/provider changes and emerging AI capabilities.
• Apply sound judgment on when AI is appropriate vs. when simpler automation or traditional engineering approaches are better.
• Establish and track SLOs/SLIs for critical AI services to meet enterprise reliability and compliance requirements.
• Integrate AI observability tooling into CI/CD so new models, prompts, and workflows are automatically enrolled in monitoring and evaluation.
• Develop automated guardrails and policy enforcement (e.g., limits, anomaly detection, abuse/failure pattern detection) with cloud engineering and security teams.

Cross Functional Partnership and Influence

• Partner with engineering teams, service owners, and stakeholders to translate business needs into technical requirements and solution designs.
• Communicate trade-offs and design decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership when needed.
• Mentor engineers and share patterns, practices, and lessons learned to raise overall AI solution design maturity.
• Partner with Product, Data Science and AI teams to design and run evaluation frameworks for LLMs/ML models (offline/online tests, benchmarks, canaries, A/B experiments).
• Work with Product, Data Science, AI Inference Engineering, and Enterprise AI teams to onboard new AI use cases into the observability platform from day one.
• Collaborate with Cloud Engineers (AWS, Azure and GCP) and SREs to align AI observability with broader platform observability and capacity management.
• Support scaling and monitoring of AI infrastructure and workloads during major releases and global events.

Required Skills & Qualifications

Technical Skills

• Strong solution design/architecture capability: end-to-end system design, integration patterns, API thinking, and operational design.
• Working knowledge of AI/ML and LLM application patterns, including:
  • LLM capabilities/limitations, prompt design, orchestration approaches, and agent workflows
  • Practical trade-offs (latency, quality, cost, safety, reliability)
  • Production AI systems and observability challenges (prompting, context windows, RAG, hallucinations, provider variability).
• Proficiency in Python (strongly preferred) and ability to prototype and validate designs with hands-on technical work.
• Cloud architecture familiarity in AWS, Azure, or GCP, including common service patterns and enterprise constraints.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, CI/CD, and cloud-native architectures.
• Strong communication skills: ability to document designs, influence decisions, and align diverse stakeholders.

About you:

Preferred Background

• 10+ years of experience with progression in solution architecture, technical strategy, or senior engineering roles.
• Experience building software prototypes and taking solutions to production in ambiguous, low-precedent environments.
• Familiarity with LLM frameworks and patterns (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), RAG/vector search concepts, and enterprise integration considerations.
• Experience with DevOps/Platform Engineering/SRE principles and designing for operational excellence.
• Exposure to enterprise service management (e.g., ServiceNow/ITSM), security architecture, and compliance-oriented environments.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through mentoring, architectural governance, or cross-team enablement.

What’s in it For You?

• 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.

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.

We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. More information on requesting an accommodation here.

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More information about Thomson Reuters can be found on thomsonreuters.com.