Senior Legal Engineer

Are you a software engineer with legal-domain expertise who is excited to build AI-powered solutions that help legal professionals work smarter and deliver better outcomes? Join Thomson Reuters and help shape the future of legal technology on the CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering team.

As a Senior Legal Engineer, you will work directly with legal customers and cross-functional teams to design, build, and improve sophisticated software and AI solutions for legal workflows. You will combine strong engineering fundamentals with legal fluency to translate real-world customer needs into secure, scalable, high-quality products.

Travel to customer sites may be required.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and deploy end-to-end software solutions for complex legal workflows and AI-enabled products.
• Partner directly with legal customers to understand their needs, workflows, and challenges, translating requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Architect and build modern cloud-native systems using distributed services, microservices, APIs, containerization, and orchestration technologies.
• Develop production-grade Python software while applying strong engineering practices for security, testing, reliability, and maintainability.
• Evaluate AI and LLM solutions for legal use cases, including assessing outputs for legal accuracy, relevance, reliability, and usability.
• Design, iterate, and optimize advanced prompting strategies for specialized legal-domain tasks.
• Apply DevOps and Infrastructure as Code practices to support secure, reliable, and automated deployments.
• Manage technical debt effectively while balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term scalability and system health.
• Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, coaching, and knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, legal, and design partners to prioritize work, manage delivery commitments, and continuously improve the software development lifecycle.

Required Qualifications

• A JD, formal legal training, or equivalent depth of experience in a legal-practice environment.
• Fluency in legal terminology and experience working directly with or alongside legal teams.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Python and experience building production-grade software.
• Experience designing and delivering distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and cloud-native applications.
• Strong knowledge of AI and LLM evaluation methodologies.
• Advanced prompt-engineering skills, including the ability to design, test, iterate, and optimize prompts for legal-domain use cases.
• Experience evaluating AI-generated outputs for legal accuracy, relevance, reliability, and safety.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to engage credibly with both lawyers and engineers.
• Comfort working independently, navigating ambiguity, and presenting in client workshops or knowledge-sharing sessions.
• A collaborative, growth-oriented mindset and a commitment to secure engineering, ethical AI, privacy, and confidentiality.

Preferred Qualifications

• Python scripting experience.
• Experience with legal technology platforms, legal SaaS products, or AI-enabled legal workflows.
• Experience building or evaluating AI tools for specific legal practice areas (transactional, litigation, compliance, or intake).
• Experience with Thomson Reuters legal products or comparable legal AI platforms.

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, whether caring for family, giving back to the community, or finding time to refresh and reset. This builds upon our flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, empowering employees to achieve a better work-life balance.
• 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. Our Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.
• 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. We live by our values: Obsess over our Customers, Compete to Win, Challenge (Y)our Thinking, Act Fast / Learn Fast, and Stronger Together.
• Social Impact: Make an impact in your community with our Social Impact Institute. We offer employees two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.
• Making a Real-World Impact: We are one of the few companies globally that helps its customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency. Together, with the professionals and institutions we serve, we help uphold the rule of law, turn the wheels of commerce, catch bad actors, report the facts, and provide trusted, unbiased information to people all over the world.