Description
CoCounsel Legal is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build and operate the Customer Files Orchestration Service – the system that makes a customer's own documents usable by CoCounsel Legal's agents.
Every file a customer brings to CoCounsel passes through this team: upload, storage, extraction, embedding, and indexing, orchestrated end-to-end. You make millions of customer files available to CoCounsel. Bringing a customer's content together with Thomson Reuters' world-class proprietary content and the latest frontier models – including TR's own custom large language models – is what makes our products highly differentiated and our agent experiences genuinely grounded.
The team owns what it builds, designing, implementing, testing, deploying, scaling, and operating the service end-to-end. As a Senior Software Engineer you own a meaningful part of that service outright. You are eager to ship something you’re proud of and become someone the team trusts.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design & Technical Ownership
+ Own the orchestration service end-to-end – Take an ambiguous problem, shape it into a design, write the ADR, build it, ship it, and operate it. + Make and defend the calls that define this domain – Where eventual consistency is safe and where only a strongly-consistent read is correct. + Build the queuing and flow-control machinery – Fair queuing so one busy tenant cannot starve another. + Treat our APIs as a product – CoCounsel's file and workspace APIs serve a growing set of consumers beyond orchestration. + Design for correctness at scale, not correctness in a test – Anticipate the failure modes that only appear under concurrency and load.
- Reliability & Operations
+ Operate what you build – Take a primary on-call rotation for the service, lead incident response, and drive the post-mortem. + Make the system explain itself – Instrument and trace well enough to tell "we never notified downstream" apart from "we notified downstream too early". + Reduce operational toil deliberately – Automate the recurring manual fix and treat a runbook step that exists only in someone's head as a defect.
- Technical Leadership & Collaboration
+ Raise the bar around you – Mentor engineers through code review and design review. + Work well across boundaries – Partner with the storage, extraction, indexing, connectors, and front-end teams. + Fully integrate Architecture and DevOps – You are part of a team where engineers do the system design. + Communicate trade-offs plainly – Make the cost of correctness, the meaning of a throughput number, and the risk in a deadline legible to product partners and to your own team.
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's or master's degree – Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years building production software – With a track record of owning significant components in systems that real customers depend on.
- Extensive AWS and production Python experience – This is a Python service on AWS, and you should be able to move confidently through both the code and the infrastructure.
- Concurrency in Python, and a healthy respect for how treacherous it is – You understand the GIL and what it does and does not protect you from.
- Kubernetes in production – Our workers and APIs run as pods with event-driven autoscaling (KEDA).
- Large-scale orchestration or data pipeline experience – Systems that move large volumes of work through multiple stages across service boundaries.
- Consistency models – You can explain where eventual consistency is safe and where it silently corrupts a user-visible outcome.
- Delivery guarantees – At-least-once versus exactly-once, why idempotency is usually the real answer.
- Queues, fair queuing, rate limiting, and backpressure – Practical, hands-on understanding.
- API design instincts – Versioned contracts, clear ownership, backward compatibility.
- Real operational ownership – You have carried the pager for something you built, debugged it under pressure.
- Strong engineering fundamentals – Testing, code review, observability, CI/CD.
- Clear communication – You can write a design down, defend it, change your mind when the evidence says so.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Documents and document management systems – Extraction, OCR, format handling.
- Event-driven architectures and streaming – Kafka/MSK or similar.
- Durable workflow engines – Temporal, Step Functions, or similar.
- Retrieval, embedding, or indexing pipelines – Supporting LLM or agentic applications.
- Prior exposure to the legal industry – A real bonus.
- Team topologies – This organization uses its vocabulary natively.
What's in it For You?
- Hybrid Work Model: Flexible hybrid working environment.
- Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: Flex My Way supportive workplace policies.
- Career Development and Growth: Culture of continuous learning and skill development.
- Industry Competitive Benefits: Comprehensive benefit plans.
- Culture: Globally recognized, award-winning reputation.
- Social Impact: Make an impact in your community.
- Making a Real-World Impact: Help uphold the rule of law, turn the wheels of commerce.