Principal Software Engineer - AI Platform & Architecture

Thomson Reuters products power the professionals who are shaping the world. Our platforms drive legal, tax, accounting, and audit products, including Cloud Audit Suite—a connected set of products spanning Engagement Manager, Guided Assurance, and Confirmation.

As a Principal Software Engineer for Cloud Audit Suite, you will be the technical architect and hands‑on design leader for our product platforms, integrating multiple products and technology stacks. You will help drive our shift to an engineering‑led, AI‑native organization, where AI writes much of the code and engineers provide judgment, architecture, and direction where it matters most.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, system design, and AI strategy for Cloud Audit Suite and new integrations to Confirmation and CoCounsel Audit via agents, APIs, MCP connections, and shared components.
• Set the technical direction for MCP servers, design agents, explore novel uses of LLMs, run experimentation, and stand up scalable solutions.
• Build and evolve systems that operate over millions of documents, structured and unstructured data, audit compliance rules, and thousands of concurrent AI interactions from accountants doing time‑sensitive work.
• Lead cross‑functional initiatives across product engineering, product, labs, UX design, and infrastructure/operations teams.
• Mentor staff and senior engineers, raising the bar on system design, code quality, and AI‑native engineering practices.
• Act as the expert in new model capabilities and scalable AI integration strategies, collaborating with AI/ML engineers, researchers, designers, and PMs to translate industry improvements into reliable, user‑facing workflows.
• Shape the team’s roadmap, technical strategy, and engineering culture, including experimentation practices, design, coding, testing, rollout, support, and post‑mortems.
• Design and own AI‑first backend systems, building and evolving AI orchestration such as routing, tool calling, MCP servers, multi‑step workflows, safety, guardrails, and robust error handling around third‑party LLMs.
• Design for high‑throughput, low‑latency AI workloads, caching, queuing, rate‑limiting, model failover, and cost/performance trade‑offs.
• Work with large‑scale data, retrieval, search, vector stores, and indexing strategies tailored to tax, account, and audit use cases.
• Help establish and refine SLOs, observability, and incident response for AI systems that must be correct, auditable, and trustworthy in professional workflows.

Required Experience & Skills

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Related Field, or Equivalent Experience.
• 8–10+ years of experience in full‑stack application development, including hands‑on architecture and design leadership for large‑scale systems.
• Expertise in C#, .NET, and production systems using ASP.NET Core, relational databases (SQL Server, PostgreSQL) and a major cloud provider (AWS preferred, Azure).
• Experience with Python in AI/ML system development, including model integration, data pipelines, or API‑based orchestration.
• Familiarity with actor model patterns and frameworks (Orleans, Akka) for resilient, message‑driven distributed architectures.
• Experience architecting and implementing accessible front‑end solutions (JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, modern frameworks such as Angular or React).
• Demonstrated passion for AI systems and new engineering paradigms: LLMs, agents, retrieval, guardrails.
• Strong background in distributed systems and cross‑system integration, including data modeling, API contracts, observability, resilience patterns, and performance tuning under load.
• Proven track record owning large, complex projects end‑to‑end: architecture, execution, rollout, and long‑term support.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to partner with product, design, UX design, and ML teams.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions).
• Hands‑on experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic) into production applications, including prompt/response management, cost controls, and safety considerations.
• Experience with AI‑adjacent infrastructure: vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, or custom retrieval pipelines.
• Direct interaction and communication with customers.
• Experience with automated testing, reliability, and release practices for systems with nondeterministic model behavior.
• Prior experience in domains where correctness, auditability, and compliance matter (fintech, tax, audit, legal, or similar).
• Strong interest in applying AI in those contexts.

Compensation

The base compensation range for this role in eligible U.S. locations is $158,900USD – $295,100USD. In other eligible locations, the range is $183,100USD – $340,000USD.

Benefits

• Hybrid work model with flexibility to work from the office 2–3 days a week or remotely up to 8 weeks per year.
• Flexible work‑life policies, including paid volunteer days, mental health days, and other supportive programs.
• Career development opportunities, continuous learning resources, and a skills‑first approach.
• Competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance, retirement plan with company match, tuition reimbursement, and employee stock purchase plan.
• Additional benefits such as housing assistance, commuter benefits, and access to wellness apps.

Equal Employment Opportunity

We seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world, regardless of race, color, sex/gender, pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. Thomson Reuters is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer providing a drug‑free workplace. We make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities, including veterans with disabilities, and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law.