{"id":3840320,"url":"https://alion.io/job/thomson-reuters-staff-software-engineer-search-retrieval-platform","title":"Staff Software Engineer, Search Retrieval Platform","company":{"id":1951,"name":"Thomson Reuters","domain":"thomsonreuters.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/thomson-reuters","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":111,"ghost_share":0.072,"stale_share":0.414,"repost_share":0.162,"time_to_fill_p50_days":27,"computed_at":"2026-11-10T06:52:35Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States","Toronto, Canada","United States"],"countries":["US","CA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":136000,"max":253000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":253000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":true},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":true},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":true},{"name":"Vespa","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-05T22:28:11Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-05","last_verified_at":"2026-11-10T14:39:48Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"Staff Software Engineer, Search Retrieval Platform\nOur vision\nWe 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.\nJob Description:\nAdvanced 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.\nYou 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.\nKey Responsibilities:\nTurn 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. \nDesign 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. \nMake retrieval customizable by design: pluggable components for chunking, enrichment, embedding, ranking, and custom models that teams can compose and tune through self-service APIs. \nOwn 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. \nPartner across disciplines\nPartner 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. \nWork with product and client teams to prioritize the roadmap, bring adoption feedback back into the platform, and reduce time-to-value for new adopters. \nQuality, security, and trust\nBuild evaluation into the platform: offline evaluation, search grading, LLM-as-judge scoring, and online experiments, so every change to retrieval can be measured. \nOwn the security posture of retrieval: multi-tenant data isolation, entitlements enforced at query time, and telemetry that protects user content. \nOwn SLOs, observability, and on-call for what you build, including tracing for agentic retrieval paths, and drive improvements from incident reviews. \nTechnical leadership\nSet architectural direction and design patterns across retrieval, search services, and the APIs teams build on, and act as the technical authority others turn to. \nLead cross-team initiatives, set priorities, and make hard trade-offs between near-term product needs and the long-term platform. \nMentor Senior and mid-level engineers, and help the team use AI-assisted development effectively. \nRequired Qualifications:\n8+ 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 \nExperience building search, retrieval, or data-intensive platforms at scale, with strong distributed systems fundamentals, in a language such as Python, Java, or Go \nTrack record translating customer needs into platform capabilities, working across product, engineering, and science \nExperience designing APIs and services consumed by multiple teams, with attention to contracts, versioning, and developer experience \nOperational rigor: SLOs, observability, on-call ownership, and learning from incidents \nFluency with AI-assisted development tools \nPreferred qualifications:\nProduction experience with search engines such as Vespa, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch \nExperience with hybrid (dense and sparse) retrieval, ranking, and embedding pipelines \nExperience building tools or APIs for AI agents, including agentic retrieval patterns and protocols such as MCP \nSearch evaluation experience: relevance metrics, LLM-as-judge, and online experimentation \nMulti-tenant authentication, authorization, and entitlements \nExperience operationalizing ML models in production, including serving, promotion, and monitoring \nWhat Success Looks Like\nIn the first 90 days\nLearn the platform's retrieval, indexing, and API architecture and its known gaps \nBuild relationships with product, research, and client teams, and understand their top pain points firsthand \nTake on-call ownership for your area and deliver one meaningful improvement to retrieval quality, reliability, or customizability \nIn the first year\nDeliver a customizable retrieval capability that a client team adopts and configures on its own, without platform team involvement \nEstablish evaluation coverage, SLOs, and runbooks for the retrieval stack \nMove at least one research innovation from experiment to supported platform capability \nBecome the recognized technical authority for retrieval on the platform, shaping standards and advising leadership \nThis posting is for proactive recruitment purposes and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies within our organization.\nWhat’s in it For You?\nHybrid 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.\nFlexibility & 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.\nCareer 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.\nIndustry 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.\n 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.\n 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. \n 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.\nOur 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.\n\nEligible 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 $136,000 USD - $253,000 USD.\nFor any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $118,400 USD - $219,800 USD.\nFor Ontario, Canada, the base compensation range for this role is $140,600 CAD - $190,600 CAD.\n\nBase 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.\nThis role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.\n\nAbout Us\nThomson 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.\nWe 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.\nAs a global business, we rely on the unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of all employees to deliver on our business goals. 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