Senior Software Engineer, Search Platform

Senior Software Engineer, Search 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

The AI Enabled Software Engineering (AIESE) team within Thomson Reuters is seeking Senior Software Engineers to build the core of that platform: the ingestion pipelines that turn content into searchable knowledge, the APIs that serve it to products and AI agents, and the cloud infrastructure that keeps it fast and reliable. Your work is what lets internal teams create, configure, and run search on their own, without waiting on a central team.

This is a full-ownership role. You design, build, test, deploy, and operate production systems at scale. We ship to production constantly, treat delivery friction as an engineering problem to solve, and use AI-assisted development as a primary tool. Senior Engineers here hold design authority within their scope, share expertise across the team, and mentor more junior engineers.

Key Responsibilities:

Build the platform

• Design, build, and test platform services across document ingestion, search indexing, and query APIs, using the language best suited to the problem (for example Python, Java, or Go).

• Build reliable pipeline components that move documents through parsing, chunking, enrichment, and indexing, using proven patterns for retries, dead-letter queues, and idempotent processing.

• Build self-service platform APIs that let client teams configure search systems, manage index lifecycles, and monitor ingestion health.

• Design retrieval interfaces for products and AI agents with predictable contracts, explicit latency budgets, and result payloads sized for LLM context windows.

• Contribute to the move from OpenSearch to Vespa, including schema migrations and zero-downtime index promotion.

• Instrument retrieval components so offline evaluation and LLM-as-judge grading can compare pipeline versions and measure search quality.

Operate what you build

• Take part in the on-call rotation and own incidents in your scope, from triage and root cause to post-mortem and systemic fixes.

• Add logging, metrics, and distributed tracing to your components, including trace-level visibility into agentic retrieval paths, and help define SLOs.

• Remove delivery friction wherever you find it: slow deployments, flaky tests, and painful local workflows. Use AI-assisted tools fluently and share what works.

Lead and collaborate

• Take technical direction for assigned projects, break customer and product requirements into executable work, and mentor more junior engineers through review and pairing.

• Work with TR Labs and research scientists to bring new search capabilities, such as embedding models, chunking strategies, and re-ranking, into production in a well-tested and observable way.

• Work with client teams to understand how they use the platform and turn their feedback into platform improvements.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend or data infrastructure systems, with end-to-end ownership of features and components. A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience

• Strong programming skills in at least one of Python, Java, Go, or an equivalent language, and the judgment to choose the right tool for the job

• Solid distributed systems fundamentals: you understand how queues, streaming pipelines, and distributed data stores fail, and you design for it

• Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform (AWS preferred) and infrastructure as code

• Operational ownership: on-call, incident response, and observability, with the view that building and operating are inseparable

• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders

Preferred qualifications:

• Production experience with a search engine such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Vespa, or Solr, including writing queries, designing indexes, or operating clusters

• Experience with Kafka or another event streaming platform

• Experience integrating AI services, such as embedding, re-ranking, and RAG components, with sound error handling and fallbacks

• Exposure to agentic retrieval patterns, such as multi-hop search or designing tool interfaces for agents

• Familiarity with search evaluation and analytics, including relevance experiments and query log analysis

What Success Looks Like

In the first 90 days

• Ramp up on the platform's architecture and operations, take on-call responsibility, and contribute production code within the first month

• Deliver one meaningful feature or reliability improvement with end-to-end ownership, from design through deployment and monitoring

• Build strong working relationships and show the team's operating principles in practice

In the first year

• Own a significant platform component end to end, with design authority, health monitoring, and steady improvements to reliability and performance

• Build technical depth in at least one domain (ingestion, indexing, query APIs, or infrastructure) and take on more complex, cross-functional work

• Strengthen the team's engineering culture through code review, documentation, operational rigor, and mentoring

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.

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 $117,700 USD - $218,600 USD. For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $102,200 USD - $189,800 USD. For Ontario, Canada, the base compensation range for this role is $111,400 CAD - $161,400 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.

Learn more on how to protect yourself from fraudulent job postings here.

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