Lead Research Engineer

Thomson Reuters Labs is seeking a Lead Research Engineer to lead the design and delivery of production-ready software for artificial intelligence (AI) model evaluation and benchmarking.

You will build scalable evaluation infrastructure that enables research and product teams to compare large language models (LLMs), measure quality, cost, and latency, and make informed decisions about model selection and development.

You will own the engineering approach from early prototypes through reliable, maintainable tools, collaborating closely with research scientists, engineering teams, and product partners while helping shape technical direction and engineering delivery.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead technical delivery and engineering planning: Partner with program and research leaders to define priorities, break projects into delivery stages, estimate effort and cost, recommend staffing and required skills, identify dependencies, and adapt plans to available resources.
• Design and build scalable evaluation infrastructure: Extend existing shared tools and services, design new components where needed, and develop production-quality Python software, APIs, and reusable evaluation frameworks.
• Turn research methods into working software: Collaborate with scientists to build automated evaluation pipelines connecting model APIs, test datasets, and agreed scoring methods.
• Ensure reliable, reproducible model comparisons: Maintain repeatable experiments, separate evaluation data from model development, and make results traceable to evaluation inputs and methods.
• Build practical tools for researchers and product teams: Develop clear user interfaces, documentation, evaluation reports, and diagnostic capabilities.
• Own production reliability, performance, and responsible data use: Integrate automated testing, deployment, and monitoring from the beginning.
• Collaborate, mentor, and guide engineering decisions: Partner with foundational research, data engineering, platform engineering, and product teams to align interfaces, responsibilities, and delivery plans.

Required Qualifications

• 8-10+ years of relevant software engineering experience, including building and maintaining production systems involving machine learning or complex data.
• Strong hands-on Python programming skills, including API design, automated testing, and working with structured and unstructured data.
• Technical leadership and end-to-end delivery experience, including architecture decisions, engineering planning, staffing and effort estimation, project execution, and adapting priorities as requirements change.
• Experience collaborating with research scientists or machine learning practitioners to translate experiments and research methods into working software.
• Experience integrating or testing machine learning models, interpreting evaluation results, and applying findings to engineering decisions.
• Cloud engineering experience using AWS, Azure, or a comparable platform, including distributed workflows, automated deployment, and monitoring.
• Working knowledge of SQL and experience developing software that processes structured and unstructured data.
• Strong collaboration, communication, problem-solving, and mentoring skills, with experience coordinating technical delivery across research, engineering, and product stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building LLM evaluation and benchmarking pipelines, including automated scoring methods and human assessment workflows.
• Familiarity with experiment tracking, dataset versioning, and reproducible evaluation processes.
• Experience in natural language processing, information retrieval, or other applications involving complex text.
• Experience reducing model inference or operating costs while maintaining evaluation quality and system performance.
• A track record of developing reusable software libraries, frameworks, or tools adopted by other engineering teams.
• Research contributions or open-source software contributions.

What's in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model: We've adopted a flexible hybrid working environment for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connected.
• 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.