Senior Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval

Senior Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval

About the Role

This role sits within Thomson Reuters Labs. You will design, build, and ship information retrieval and NLP systems that directly power Westlaw, Practical Law, and Checkpoint. The expectation is production-grade, measurable impact at scale for legal professionals globally.

You will own technical delivery end-to-end across large-scale search system design, low-latency retrieval, and evaluation framework development. You will work closely with product and engineering to move from problem definition to shipped, reliable systems.

About You

You hold a PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, Information Retrieval, or a related field - or a Master's with equivalent depth of industry experience - with 5+ years of post-degree industry experience building and deploying IR and NLP systems in production commercial settings. You publish, you ship, and you measure success by what performs in production at scale.

What You'll Do

• Design and deploy large-scale information retrieval systems with explicit focus on search performance, latency optimisation, and retrieval quality at scale

• Own end-to-end model development across research, data engineering, evaluation, and production deployment

• Design rigorous evaluation frameworks - component-level and end-to-end - covering precision@K, recall@K, latency metrics, and relevance judgement

• Translate business and customer objectives into concrete technical requirements, scoping feasibility and delivery milestones

• Partner with engineering on software delivery, MLOps processes, model monitoring, evaluation pipelines, and retraining workflows

• Operate iteratively in an agile environment, driving quick cycles guided by customer feedback

• Communicate research through peer-reviewed publications and develop patentable ideas that sustain the competitiveness of Thomson Reuters' products

• Guide and mentor junior scientists across research, data engineering, and evaluation
  

Required Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, Information Retrieval, or a related field - or Master's with equivalent post-degree industry experience - required

• 5+ years of post-degree industry experience building and shipping IR and NLP systems into production - not research-only experience

• Publications at ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent

• Production Python and hands-on experience with PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers
  

Hands-on production depth required in:

• Large-scale information retrieval system design, including index architecture, query optimisation, and latency-constrained retrieval

• Search evaluation methodology: precision@K, recall@K, latency benchmarking, and rigorous offline and online evaluation framework design

• NLP system development for commercial applications - classification, extraction, ranking, or generation

• Translating complex, ambiguous business problems into scoped, deliverable AI solutions

• Collaborating with product, engineering, and business stakeholders in agile delivery settings
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch in research or production settings - index design, query optimisation, performance analysis

• Legal domain search, legal IR, or legal NLP experience

• AzureML or AWS SageMaker
  

#LI-LP2

New Position: This position is open due to an existing vacancy to support our evolving business needs.

What's in it For You?

• 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. 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.

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