New Position: This position is open due to an existing vacancy to support our evolving business needs.
Senior Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval
About The Role
This role sits within Thomson Reuters Labs. You will design, build, and ship information retrieval and NLP systems that directly power Westlaw, Practical Law, and Checkpoint. The expectation is production-grade, measurable impact at scale for legal professionals globally.
You will own technical delivery end-to-end across large-scale search system design, low-latency retrieval, and evaluation framework development. You will work closely with product and engineering to move from problem definition to shipped, reliable systems.
About You
You hold a PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, Information Retrieval, or a related field — or a Master's with equivalent depth of industry experience — with 5+ years of post-degree industry experience building and deploying IR and NLP systems in production commercial settings. You publish, you ship, and you measure success by what performs in production at scale.
What You'll Do
- Design and deploy large-scale information retrieval systems with explicit focus on search performance, latency optimisation, and retrieval quality at scale
- Own end-to-end model development across research, data engineering, evaluation, and production deployment
- Design rigorous evaluation frameworks — component-level and end-to-end — covering precision@K, recall@K, latency metrics, and relevance judgement
- Translate business and customer objectives into concrete technical requirements, scoping feasibility and delivery milestones
- Partner with engineering on software delivery, MLOps processes, model monitoring, evaluation pipelines, and retraining workflows
- Operate iteratively in an agile environment, driving quick cycles guided by customer feedback
- Communicate research through peer-reviewed publications and develop patentable ideas that sustain the competitiveness of Thomson Reuters' products
- Guide and mentor junior scientists across research, data engineering, and evaluation
Required Qualifications
- PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, Information Retrieval, or a related field — or Master's with equivalent post-degree industry experience — required
- 5+ years of post-degree industry experience building and shipping IR and NLP systems into production — not research-only experience
- Publications at ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent
- Production Python and hands-on experience with PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers
Hands-on Production Depth Required In
- Large-scale information retrieval system design, including index architecture, query optimisation, and latency-constrained retrieval
- Search evaluation methodology: precision@K, recall@K, latency benchmarking, and rigorous offline and online evaluation framework design
- NLP system development for commercial applications — classification, extraction, ranking, or generation
- Translating complex, ambiguous business problems into scoped, deliverable AI solutions
- Collaborating with product, engineering, and business stakeholders in agile delivery settings
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch in research or production settings — index design, query optimisation, performance analysis
- Legal domain search, legal IR, or legal NLP experience
- 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