Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval

About The Role

This is an applied science position focused on building and deploying production-grade search systems that power Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel. You will work across neural information retrieval, semantic and hybrid search, re-ranking, and query understanding — delivering search quality and relevance at scale for legal and professional content.

About You

You hold a PhD or Master's in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field, with 3+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping search or retrieval systems into production. You have hands-on depth in neural IR and deep learning for NLP, you work independently, and you measure success by what performs in production.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and deploy end-to-end neural search systems including dense retrieval, hybrid search, semantic chunking, embedding models, cross-encoders, SLM re-rankers, and transformer-based approaches
• Develop models for query understanding, document re-ranking, and retrieval quality optimisation
• Build evaluation frameworks — component-level and end-to-end — using expert annotation and synthetic data generation
• Drive independent technical decisions on retrieval architecture, indexing strategy, ranking models, and evaluation methodology
• Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines
• Contribute to published research at venues such as SIGIR, ECIR, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, and ICLR, and to intellectual property

Required Qualifications

• PhD or Master's in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field
• 3+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping search, retrieval, or RAG systems into production — not research-only experience
• Publications at SIGIR, ECIR, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, or equivalent
• Production Python and experience with PyTorch, DeepSpeed, Torchtune, or LlamaFactory

Hands-on Production Depth Required In

• Neural IR fundamentals: BM25, hybrid search, dense retrieval (DPR, ColBERT), bi-encoders, cross-encoders, late interaction models
• Search and RAG system design: vector databases, retrieval strategies, document chunking, metadata filtering, re-ranking, context optimisation, and orchestration
• Evaluation framework design for retrieval quality at component and system level
• Post-training of large language models and their application to retrieval systems
• Deep learning and NLP fundamentals

Preferred Qualifications

• Search, QA, or RAG over large corpora and long documents, including legal or enterprise search
• Multi-stage or agentic retrieval architectures and query understanding for complex information needs
• Legal domain applications: case law retrieval, precedent finding, document review
• AzureML or AWS SageMaker

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role) 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.

In the United States, Thomson Reuters offers a comprehensive benefits package to our employees. Our benefit package includes market competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs, as well as a competitive 401k plan with company match. In addition, Thomson Reuters offers market leading work life benefits with competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off, paid holidays (including two company mental health days off), parental leave, sabbatical leave. These benefits meet or exceeds the requirements of paid time off in accordance with any applicable state or municipal laws. Finally, Thomson Reuters offers the following additional benefits: optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance paid 100% by the employee; optional life and AD&D insurance paid 100% by the employee; Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts; fitness reimbursement; access to Employee Assistance Program; Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit paid 100% by employee; access to 529 Plan; commuter benefits; Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance; Tuition Reimbursement; and access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

Thomson Reuters complies with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. The base compensation range varies across locations. Eligible office location(s) for this role include one or more of the following: New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and/or Irvine, CA; McLean, VA; Washington, DC. The base compensation range for the role in any of those locations is $136,000 USD - $253,000 USD. For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $118,400 USD - $219,800 USD. Base pay is positioned within the range based on several factors including an individual’s knowledge, skills and experience with consideration given to internal equity. Base pay is one part of a comprehensive Total Reward program which also includes flexible and supportive benefits and other wellbeing programs. This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.

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.

We are powered by the talents of 26,000 employees across more than 70 countries, where everyone has a chance to contribute and grow professionally in flexible work environments. At a time when objectivity, accuracy, fairness, and transparency are under attack, we consider it our duty to pursue them. Sound exciting? Join us and help shape the industries that move society forward.

As a global business, we rely on the unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of all employees to deliver on our business goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including 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.

Thomson Reuters makes reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities, including veterans with disabilities, and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. If you reside in the United States and require an accommodation in the recruiting process, you may contact our Human Resources Department at View email address on jobradars.com. Disability accommodations in the recruiting process may include things like a sign language interpreter, making interview rooms accessible, providing assistive technology, or other relevant accommodations. Please note this email is not intended for general recruitment questions and we will promptly respond to inquiries regarding accommodations. More information on requesting an accommodation here.

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More information about Thomson Reuters can be found on thomsonreuters.com