Director, Applied Research

About the Role

Thomson Reuters Labs is seeking an experienced applied science leader with a strong product mindset to lead a high-performing team developing transformative AI solutions for tax, audit, and accounting professionals.

TR Labs experiments, builds, and delivers. We support the organization and our customers through applied research and innovation, working closely with product and domain experts to identify compelling solutions at the intersection of customer needs and technical feasibility.

This role will lead applied research and development for the next generation of agentic AI capabilities supporting tax and accounting professionals around the world. You will help create entirely new workflows that address fundamental challenges across the industry.

Thomson Reuters brings together the critical ingredients required to build differentiated AI solutions in this space—from annotated tax law and robust tax engines to end-to-end platforms for data management, filing, audit, and compliance. You will join the R&D organization supporting Thomson Reuters' tax product portfolio, including Checkpoint, CoCounsel Tax, and OneSource.

This is a highly collaborative leadership role. You will partner closely with product engineering, product management, domain experts, and business stakeholders to bring high-value AI capabilities into production, particularly in high-stakes environments where accuracy, verification, and customer trust are essential.

What You'll Do

Lead and develop a high-performing applied science team focused on agentic AI solutions for tax and accounting professionals.

Drive the design, development, and delivery of AI features that meaningfully reimagine customer workflows in high-stakes, accuracy-critical settings.

Set technical direction for applied research initiatives, balancing scientific rigor, customer value, product feasibility, and delivery timelines.

Partner closely with product engineering teams to transition research innovations into scalable, reliable, production-ready capabilities.

Serve as a strategic thought partner to Labs leadership, product leadership, and key business stakeholders on long-term AI strategy, external partnerships, and capability roadmaps.

Influence product strategy through deep technical expertise and insights derived from product usage data, quality metrics, evaluations, and customer feedback.

Develop and advance approaches for LLM-based systems, agentic workflows, information retrieval, document understanding, knowledge representation, and AI evaluation.

Ensure AI systems are designed with appropriate accuracy, verification, observability, safety, and quality controls for professional tax and accounting use cases.

Engage tax, audit, accounting, and other subject-matter experts in concept development, design workshops, experimentation, and solution validation.

Continuously improve ways of working across R&D and product engineering in a fast-paced, tightly embedded delivery environment.

Foster a culture of innovation, rigor, collaboration, technical excellence, and continuous learning across the team.

Represent TR Labs and the broader tax technology organization in internal technical forums, cross-functional initiatives, and relevant external research communities.

About You

You are an accomplished applied science leader who combines deep AI and machine learning expertise with a strong product orientation and a record of delivering commercial impact.

You are excited by the challenge of translating emerging AI research into practical, high-value capabilities for professionals operating in complex and highly regulated domains. You understand that success is not defined solely by model performance, but by the ability to create trustworthy solutions that improve real customer workflows.

You bring hands-on experience building production-grade LLM and agentic AI systems, along with the technical depth to guide architectural and scientific decisions across a team of experienced researchers and engineers.

You are comfortable operating across strategy and execution: setting research direction, influencing product roadmaps, engaging domain experts, evaluating technical trade-offs, and supporting teams as they deliver production-ready solutions.

You build trust through scientific credibility, customer empathy, thoughtful collaboration, and a commitment to developing exceptional talent.

Qualifications

PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a closely related field; or a Master's degree with equivalent depth, a strong scientific background, and a relevant publication record.

10+ years of hands-on industry experience building AI and machine learning systems for commercial applications; research-only experience is not sufficient.

Recent, direct hands-on experience developing LLM-based and agentic AI systems for production, non-trivial use cases.

5+ years of experience managing and developing high-performing applied science, machine learning, or AI research teams.

Demonstrated success in product-facing or customer-facing roles, with measurable business and customer impact as the primary measure of success.

Technical depth in AI and machine learning sufficient to challenge assumptions, expand upon team ideas, guide high-quality technical decisions, and establish effective research direction.

Strong expertise in information retrieval and natural language processing, particularly in complex vertical domains.

Experience with one or more of the following: taxonomy induction, document understanding, agentic search, knowledge graphs, neuro-symbolic AI, or comparable approaches for complex knowledge-intensive workflows.

Experience evaluating AI agents and language-model-based systems, including approaches involving verifiable rewards, synthetic data generation, and rigorous quality measurement.

A relevant publication record, including publications at ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent venues.

Experience building AI solutions for tax, legal, audit, accounting, or other highly regulated and knowledge-intensive domains.

A demonstrated track record of growth and leadership at top-tier technology companies, high-growth startups, or similarly demanding environments.

Strong communication and influencing skills, with the ability to work effectively with applied scientists, engineers, product leaders, domain experts, and senior business stakeholders.

A passion for developing people, building strong teams, and creating an inclusive, high-performing culture.

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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.

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