# Lead Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval

**Company**: Thomson Reuters
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $147,600 USD - $274,200 USD
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External_Career_Site/job/United-States-of-America-New-York-New-York/Lead-Applied-Scientist--Search---Information-Retrieval_JREQ204466-2?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_7093a8bd-6db

## Description

This role sits within the applied science function. You will own the design, development, and production deployment of large-scale search and information retrieval systems that power Westlaw, Practical Law, CoCounsel, and next-generation Thomson Reuters search experiences.

You will work across retrieval architectures, indexing pipelines, ranking and re-ranking systems, semantic retrieval, hybrid search, and retrieval optimization for complex legal, tax, and accounting content. Multiple product teams depend on what this function delivers.

**Key Responsibilities:**

- Design and deploy search architectures supporting large-scale legal, tax, and enterprise content collections

- Build and optimize ingestion pipelines that analyze, enrich, and prepare documents for retrieval

- Develop ranking and re-ranking systems using both traditional IR techniques and modern LLM-based approaches

- Improve retrieval quality through semantic retrieval, hybrid retrieval, query understanding, and relevance optimization

- Design evaluation frameworks for retrieval performance, relevance, ranking quality, and end-user outcomes

- Lead technical decisions around indexing strategies, retrieval architectures, ranking models, and search infrastructure

- Partner with engineering teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and performant search services

- Contribute to the development of self-service search platform capabilities used by internal product teams

- Provide technical input to senior leadership on search, retrieval, and AI strategy

- Mentor applied scientists and machine learning practitioners across the organization

**Required Qualifications:**

- PhD in Computer Science, Information Retrieval, AI, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field preferred

- 8+ years of industry experience building production search, information retrieval, ranking, or recommendation systems

- Publications at SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, WWW, or equivalent venues

- Strong production Python skills and experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and distributed model development

**Preferred Qualifications:**

- Experience with legal, regulatory, tax, scientific, or other text-heavy domains

- Building retrieval systems over large enterprise knowledge repositories

- Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Vespa, or similar search technologies

- API platform development and self-service search platforms

- Agentic AI systems that incorporate retrieval capabilities

- AzureML or AWS SageMaker

- Experience building systems that combine search, retrieval, and document understanding capabilities

**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

- 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

- 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

- Social Impact: Make an impact in your community with our Social Impact Institute

- Making a Real-World Impact: We are one of the few companies globally that helps its customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency

## Skills

### Required
- Computer Science
- Information Retrieval
- Machine Learning
- NLP
- Python
- PyTorch
- Hugging Face Transformers

### Nice to have
- Elasticsearch
- OpenSearch
- Solr
- Vespa
- AzureML
- AWS SageMaker

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Source: [Apply at thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com](https://thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External_Career_Site/job/United-States-of-America-New-York-New-York/Lead-Applied-Scientist--Search---Information-Retrieval_JREQ204466-2?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)