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