Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

This role sits within the applied science function. You will own the design, development, and production deployment of document understanding systems that directly power Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel. The problems are real, the scale is large, and the expectation is shipped, reliable, measurable impact.

You will work across semantic chunking, document enrichment, knowledge graph construction, and synthetic data generation for complex legal, tax, and accounting content. Multiple product teams depend on what this function delivers.

About You

You hold a PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field, with 8+ years of post-degree industry experience taking NLP and document understanding systems from development to production at scale. You have hands-on depth across the full applied arc — model development, distillation, evaluation, and deployment. You publish, you mentor, and you 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 using legal and customer-defined taxonomies
• Develop LLM-based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link citations, entities, and legal concepts across diverse legal content
• Lead knowledge distillation efforts 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
• Own technical decisions on architecture, chunking strategy, classification approach, and knowledge extraction methods
• Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines
• Provide technical input to senior leadership on AI strategy and roadmap
• Mentor applied scientists and ML practitioners on the team

Required Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field — required
• 8+ 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
• 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 and annotation workflow design
• End-to-end evaluation framework design for document understanding

Preferred Qualifications

• Legal document understanding, legal IE, or legal AI experience
• Complex document structures: nested hierarchies, cross-references, non-uniform formatting
• Retrieval or QA systems over large document collections
• RAG and agentic workflows in enterprise settings
• Knowledge graph frameworks for legal or enterprise applications
• 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.

Our use of AI within the recruitment process Thomson Reuters utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support parts of our global recruitment process. Unless you opt-out, our AI system will assess the information provided by you and compare it to the requirements listed for the role, and present the result to our recruitment personnel for further review. The AI system acts as a supporting tool, but there is always a human making the decision if you will be considered for the role.

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.

For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $147,600 USD - $274,200 USD.

For Ontario, Canada, the base compensation range for this role is $140,000 CAD - $175,000 CAD.

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.

This job posting will close 05/13/2026.

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.

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