# Director of Applied Research, Information Retrieval

**Company**: Thomson Reuters
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External_Career_Site/job/United-States-of-America-New-York-New-York/Director-of-Applied-Research_JREQ203936-1?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_90ec5e78-8cf

## Description

You will join the global labs leadership team as a key leader shaping the technical vision and culture of Thomson Reuters' IR and AI research initiatives.

As Director of Applied Research, you will define and drive the technical vision for AI-powered search, discovery, and knowledge systems that unlock value from Thomson Reuters' unique data assets.

**Key Responsibilities:**

- Define Technical Vision & Strategy:

- Set the strategic direction for Information Retrieval research and innovation at Thomson Reuters

- Establish the technical direction for retrieval, ranking, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic retrieval system capabilities

- Design and optimize retrieval architectures leveraging embeddings, reranking, hybrid search, knowledge graphs, and contextual retrieval techniques

- Build evaluation frameworks and benchmarks for search quality, relevance, answer quality, and real-world business impact

- Build & Lead a High-Performing Team:

- Hire, train, and manage a highly skilled team with expertise across cloud engineering, machine learning engineering, data engineering, and AI research

- Mentor scientists and engineers while establishing best practices for production AI development and deployment

- Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning across the global labs organization

- Drive Production AI Solutions:

- Lead development of enterprise-grade retrieval, ranking, NLP, and knowledge-based AI solutions that integrate with Thomson Reuters products

- Partner closely with Product and Engineering teams to translate customer needs and domain-specific challenges into scalable AI applications

- Drive Strategy & Business Impact:

- Proactively identify opportunities where Labs can improve the status quo or generate new business value through AI/ML innovation

- Influence the global project portfolio and investment decisions with your expertise in applied AI and domain knowledge

- Be a Trusted Advisor:

- Actively engage across cross-functional teams, sharing knowledge, valuing diverse ideas, and building relationships with technology and product leaders

**Required Qualifications:**

- PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, or a closely related field

- 8+ years of industry experience building and deploying production AI systems at scale

- Proven track record of successfully taking machine learning and AI solutions from research to production-grade software with measurable business impact

**Benefits:**

- Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: Flex My Way, work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year

- Career Development and Growth: Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach

- Industry Competitive Benefits: comprehensive benefit plans, flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, access to the Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement

- Culture: globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance

- Social Impact: Social Impact Institute, two paid volunteer days off annually, opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and ESG initiatives

## Skills

### Required
- Information Retrieval
- Search
- Natural Language Processing
- Generative AI
- Machine Learning
- Deep Learning
- Python
- PyTorch
- Hugging Face
- AWS
- Azure

### Nice to have
- Hybrid search
- Vector databases
- Recommendation systems
- Large-scale retrieval platforms
- MLOps frameworks
- Containerization
- DevOps practices for AI systems

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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/Director-of-Applied-Research_JREQ203936-1?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)