Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer)

Job title: Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer)

About the Role Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer) responsible for the architecture and system design of Audit Suite. You will own core backend and AI orchestration systems that turn frontier models into reliable, production‑grade workflows at scale. You will also help drive Thomson Reuters toward an AI-native engineering culture where AI writes code and engineers guide architecture and judgment where it matters most.

What You'll Do

• Technical leadership and cross‑functional influence across AI, product, and infra; lead multi‑quarter initiatives (e.g., new orchestration layer, low‑latency retrieval system, unified knowledge base).
• Mentor engineers to raise the bar on system design, code quality, and AI integration practices across the org.
• Be the go‑to expert in new model capabilities; collaborate with AI/ML engineers, researchers, designers, and PMs to translate improvements into reliable, user‑facing workflows.
• Shape the team’s roadmap, technical strategy, and engineering culture—from experimentation practices to testing, rollout, and postmortems.
• Design and own AI‑first backend systems: end‑to‑end architecture of services (C#/.NET, Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, Vercel) that orchestrate across heterogeneous stacks.
• Build and evolve AI orchestration: routing, tool calling, MCP servers, multi‑step workflows, safety/guardrails, and robust error handling around LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others).
• Scale, reliability, and performance: high throughput, low latency, caching, queuing, rate‑limiting, model failover, and cost/performance trade‑offs.
• Work with large‑scale data: millions of documents, retrieval and search, vector stores, and indexing strategies for tax and accounting use cases.
• Establish and refine SLOs, observability, and incident response for AI systems that must be correct, auditable, and trustworthy in professional workflows.

What We're Looking For

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Computer Engineering or equivalent; 10+ years total experience, 2+ years in a lead role, and 5+ years full‑stack development.
• C#, .NET expertise with ASP.NET Core (or similar), relational databases (SQL Server, PostgreSQL or equivalent), and a major cloud provider (AWS preferred, Azure).
• Front‑end experience: JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS; experience with modern frameworks like React or Angular.
• Strong background in distributed systems: data modeling, API contracts, observability, resilience patterns, and performance tuning under load.
• Proven track record leading large, complex projects end‑to‑end: architecture, execution, rollout, and long‑term operation.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with product, design, and ML teams in a fast‑moving environment.
• Demonstrated interest in AI systems and new engineering paradigms: LLMs, agents, retrieval, or similar – you care about what “AI‑native” software should look like.

Nice to Have

• Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines (i.e., GitHub Actions).
• Hands‑on experience integrating LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) into production applications, including prompt/response management, cost controls, and safety considerations.
• Experience with AI‑adjacent infrastructure: vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, or custom retrieval pipelines.
• Opinions and experience around automated testing, reliability, and release practices for systems with non‑deterministic model behavior.
• Prior experience in domains where correctness, auditability, and compliance are important.