Principal Software Engineer / Architect – AI (Legal FDE)

About the role

Thomson Reuters is looking for a recognized technical authority to set the direction for how top law firms and corporate legal departments adopt AI. As the senior-most individual contributor on the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, you will define and drive the technology strategy and roadmap for bespoke AI solutions, owning the team's most complex and strategically important engagements alongside Staff Software Engineers and Architects. The role is hands-on technical leadership with broad influence.

Key responsibilities

• Define the long-term technical vision, requirements and roadmaps for FDE, and lead the selection and adoption of technologies and patterns
• Lead complex, high-risk AI initiatives from concept to production, architecting scalable, secure systems that integrate with client environments
• Design RAG pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, event-driven backends and agentic workflows using CoCounsel, Westlaw and Practical Law capabilities
• Set standards for MLOps/LLMOps, Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD, and establish AI monitoring, observability and LLM evaluation strategies
• Act as the senior technical voice in discovery, present strategy to executives, and mentor and coach staff and senior engineers

Required profile

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in system design, distributed systems and architecture
• Track record of leading highly complex, high-risk projects and influencing senior leadership
• Expert-level hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML and LLM-powered applications in production
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and a track record of AI-native engineering practices

Required skills

• Orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI or AutoGen, and RAG architectures
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) patterns
• Expert Python (FastAPI or equivalent), RESTful, async and event-driven architectures
• A major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK)
• Observability tools (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus) and AI evaluation platforms (LangSmith, Langfuse, Braintrust, W&B)
• Secure API development with OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and JWT

What we offer

• Flexible hybrid work and policies such as work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year
• Health, dental, vision, disability and life insurance, 401k with company match, tuition reimbursement and mental health support
• Annual bonus eligibility, two paid volunteer days and social impact opportunities