Senior Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Senior Applied Scientist, Document Understanding This is an applied science position focused on designing, building, and deploying production-grade document understanding systems that power Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel. You will work across semantic chunking, document enrichment, and knowledge graph construction for complex legal, tax, and accounting content — delivering foundational intelligence that multiple product teams depend on at scale. You hold a PhD or Master's in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field, with 5+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping document understanding, information extraction, or knowledge graph systems into production. You have hands-on depth across model development, distillation, evaluation, and deployment. You work independently, lead through influence in an applied research setting, and measure success by what ships and performs in production. What You'll Do Design and deploy semantic chunking models for lengthy, non-uniformly structured legal documents with adjustable granularity across use cases Build document enrichment systems that classify documents according to legal and customer-defined taxonomies and extract rich metadata Develop LLM-based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link citations, entities, and legal concepts across diverse legal content Build scalable synthetic data generation systems for model training, multi-hop query simulation, and hallucination-free answer generation Apply knowledge distillation techniques to compress large models into latency-constrained, production-ready SLMs Design evaluation frameworks — component-level and end-to-end — using expert annotation and synthetic data Drive independent technical decisions on chunking strategy, classification approach, knowledge extraction methods, and multi-document reasoning architecture Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines Contribute to published research at venues such as ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, and KDD, and to intellectual property Required Qualifications PhD or Master's in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field 5+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping document understanding, information extraction, or knowledge graph systems into production — not research-only experience Publications at ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent Experience leading through influence in an applied research setting Production Python and experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and DeepSpeed Hands-on production depth required in: Document layout analysis and semantic chunking beyond fixed-size or paragraph-based methods Hierarchical, multi-label document classification with domain-specific and customer-defined schemas Entity recognition and linking, relation extraction, citation parsing, and knowledge graph construction from unstructured text LLM-based information extraction, few-shot and multi-task learning, and post-training Knowledge distillation, model compression, and SLM deployment under latency constraints Synthetic data generation for NLP: query-answer generation with verification and scalable data augmentation Annotation workflow design and evaluation framework development for document understanding tasks Preferred Qualifications Legal document understanding, legal information extraction, or legal AI applications Complex document structures common in legal content: nested hierarchies, cross-references, non-uniform formatting, and embedded elements Retrieval, QA, or analysis systems over large document collections Knowledge graph frameworks for legal or enterprise applications RAG and agentic workflows for enterprise knowledge systems AzureML or AWS SageMaker What's in it For You? 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. About Us Thomson Reuters informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. We serve professionals across legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media. Our products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions, and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a world leading provider of trusted journalism and news. 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