Senior Applied Scientist

About the Role

Are you ready to work at the forefront of applied AI research, where your work reaches real customers instead of staying in a lab notebook?

Thomson Reuters Labs (TR Labs) is the AI Research & Development arm of Thomson Reuters. We experiment, we build, we deliver.

Our mission is to create industry-leading AI solutions for Legal, Tax & Accounting, Risk, and News Media professionals.

We systematically explore emerging AI/ML technologies, and we stay focused on real customer problems and opportunities.

The Senior Applied Scientist is an experienced scientific leader within TR Labs. In this role, you will own end-to-end applied research projects that drive product innovation in legal intelligence, tax automation, and regulatory compliance.

You will translate business challenges into technical solutions, determine feasibility, and deliver scalable AI capabilities. You will bring senior-level technical judgment to decisions about what to build, how to evaluate it, and when it is ready to ship.

You will also mentor scientists and influence technical direction within your team. This role is a step toward broader scientific leadership, and you will begin to grow and scale your impact as you go.

This is a role for someone who wants their ideas to ship. You will turn new methods into AI capabilities that customers use every day.

What You'll Do

• Lead end-to-end applied research projects from early experimentation through to scalable, production-ready AI capabilities.
• Drive product innovation in legal intelligence, tax automation, and regulatory compliance.
• Translate business challenges into technical solutions and determine their feasibility.
• Design and evaluate RAG architectures, agentic frameworks, and tool-using systems for complex professional use cases.
• Apply senior-level technical judgment and rigorous evaluation to ensure solutions meet the quality bar.
• Develop novel methods for complex professional domains such as medical, tax, or law.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to deliver AI projects from concept to customer.
• Influence technical direction within your team through clear communication.
• Mentor scientists and help them grow.
• Start to grow and scale your impact beyond individual projects.

About You

You are an experienced scientist who gets energy from turning hard business problems into working AI solutions. You are comfortable moving between research and delivery, and you can own a project from first idea to production.

You combine years of hands-on experience in modern AI with outstanding technical judgment. You are curious about the professional domains you work in, whether that is law, tax, medicine, or risk. You want to understand customers' problems well enough to solve them properly.

You work well in collaborative, cross-functional environments. You build trust through evaluation expertise and clear communication. You influence technical direction by helping the people around you succeed.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master's degree with equivalent industry experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying production IR, NLP, ML, or GenAI systems using modern techniques.
• Demonstrated experience leading end-to-end AI project delivery in collaborative, cross-functional environments.
• Outstanding technical judgment and evaluation expertise.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction.
• Experience developing novel methods for complex professional domains such as medical, tax, or law.
• Expertise in RAG architectures, agentic frameworks, tool-using systems, or orchestration patterns.
• Publications at relevant venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, or KDD.

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.

Our use of AI within the recruitment process Thomson Reuters utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support parts of our global recruitment process. Unless you opt-out, our AI system will assess the information provided by you and compare it to the requirements listed for the role, and present the result to our recruitment personnel for further review. The AI system acts as a supporting tool, but there is always a human making the decision if you will be considered for the role.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 $146,800 USD - $272,600 USD. For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $127,400 USD - $236,600 USD. For Ontario, Canada, the base compensation range for this role is $100,000 CAD - $145,000 CAD. 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