Director, Applied Research

Role Description

Are you excited about working at the forefront of applied research in an industry setting? Thomson Reuters Labs is seeking an experienced scientist with a strong product mindset to lead a high-performing team developing transformative solutions for tax, audit, and accounting professionals.

What does TR Labs do? We experiment, we build, we deliver. We support the organization and our customers through applied research and innovation. We work closely with product and domain experts to identify compelling solutions at the intersection of customer needs and technical feasibility. We partner closely with product engineering teams to deliver real value in high-stakes settings, where accuracy and verification are essential.

Our team is designing the next generation of agentic AI for tax & accounting professionals around the globe. This is an opportunity to create entirely new workflows addressing fundamental challenges in the industry. TR has all the ingredients from annotated tax law to robust tax engines and end-to-end solutions for data management, filing, audit, and compliance. Come join the R&D team for Thomson Reuters’ portfolio of tax products, including Checkpoint, CoCounsel Tax, and OneSource.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field or Master's with a strong science background and relevant publication record — required
• 10+ years of hands-on industry experience building AI/ML systems for commercial applications — not research-only experience
• Recent, direct hands-on experience developing LLM-based and agentic AI systems for production, non-trivial use cases
• 5+ years of experience managing and developing high-performing applied science or ML teams
• Demonstrated success in product- or customer-facing roles, with business and customer impact as the primary measure of success
• Technical depth in AI/ML sufficient to provide effective challenge, expand on team ideas, and support high-quality technical decision-making

Requirements

• Technical depth in information retrieval and NLP, with experience in complex vertical domains — taxonomy induction, document understanding, agentic search, knowledge graphs, or neuro-symbolic approaches
• Experience with AI agent evaluation, language model training with verifiable rewards, and synthetic data generation
• Publications at ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent
• Experience building AI solutions for tax, legal, audit, or accounting domains
• Track record of growth at top-tier technology companies or high-growth startups

Benefits

• 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: Fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development.
• Industry Competitive Benefits: Comprehensive benefit plans including flexible vacation, mental health days, retirement savings, and more.
• Culture: Award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, and work-life balance.
• Social Impact: Opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and ESG initiatives.
• Making a Real-World Impact: Helping customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency.