Principal Software Engineer / Architect – AI, CoCounsel FDE

Job Description

Thomson Reuters is looking for a Principal Software Engineer / Architect – AI to join our CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering organization. In this highly hands-on individual contributor role, you will work directly with customers to solve complex business and technical problems, design and build production AI solutions, and help shape how customer-driven innovation strengthens the broader CoCounsel product.

This role is ideal for a Principal-level engineer who combines deep software architecture and AI expertise with strong hands-on engineering skills. You will remain close to the code, lead some of our most complex technical engagements, influence senior engineers and product leaders, and help establish the technical direction for how AI solutions are securely deployed in enterprise customer environments.

This is not an architecture-only or advisory role. We are looking for a Principal-level technical leader who still actively writes, reviews, and debugs production code.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead complex customer and technical engagements end to end, from discovery and architecture through production deployment, while remaining technically involved throughout the full lifecycle.
• Design, build, and deploy production AI solutions within enterprise and customer-owned environments, while personally contributing to and reviewing production code.
• Set architectural direction across AI, distributed systems, integrations, security, reliability, and deployment, and provide technical guidance to Senior and Staff-level engineers.
• Partner closely with customers, Product, and Engineering to translate real-world customer needs and emerging patterns into scalable product capabilities, anticipating future needs and helping shape the core CoCounsel roadmap.
• Identify patterns across customer engagements and turn field learnings into reusable architectures, technical standards, platform improvements, and product direction.
• Influence technical strategy across Forward Deployed Engineering and related Thomson Reuters teams, evaluating new technologies, mentoring engineers, raising the engineering and architectural bar, and advising senior leaders on high-impact technical decisions.
• Communicate complex technical decisions clearly to engineers, product leaders, executives, and customer stakeholders, including high-stakes tradeoffs involving security, reliability, scalability, and business impact.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant technical leadership at the Principal, Architect, or senior individual-contributor level.
• Strong recent hands-on software engineering experience, including personally writing, reviewing, and debugging production code.
• Deep experience designing, building, and delivering complex production software systems.
• Significant experience with AI/ML, Generative AI, or LLM-powered systems in production environments.
• Experience architecting and delivering AI solutions that integrate with enterprise or customer-owned infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, system integration, cloud architecture, scalability, reliability, security, and production operations.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex technical initiatives or customer engagements end to end, with the ability to influence architecture and technical direction across multiple teams.
• Ability to translate customer-specific technical work into reusable, scalable product capabilities in partnership with Product and Engineering.
• Experience mentoring, reviewing, and providing technical direction to Senior and Staff-level engineers.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to represent technical strategy credibly with engineers, product partners, executives, and customers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or deploying LLM, agentic AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), evaluation, or other Generative AI systems in production.
• Experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, customer engineering, solutions engineering, or another deeply technical customer-facing engineering environment.
• Experience working with large enterprise customers and complex customer-owned infrastructure.
• Experience in legal technology, financial services, professional services, or other highly regulated environments.
• Familiarity with security, privacy, governance, or fiduciary-grade requirements for enterprise AI deployment.
• Demonstrated external technical presence through open-source contributions, publications, conference presentations, patents, technical communities, or equivalent industry recognition.
• Experience influencing product strategy based on direct customer and field experience.

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This posting is for proactive recruitment purposes and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies within our organization.

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment 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.

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.

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 $183,100 USD - $340,000 USD.
For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $158,900 USD - $295,100 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.


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 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 HR.Leave-Expert@thomsonreuters.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