Senior Software Engineer, Search Platform

Senior Software Engineer, Search Platform

Our vision

We are building the next-generation search platform, with a vision to democratize knowledge construction and consumption at Thomson Reuters. The platform consolidates search systems across Thomson Reuters products and services, serving millions of end users, internal agents, and internal search teams, into a fully managed, customizable, sovereign, and self-serve search platform.

Job Description

The AI Enabled Software Engineering (AIESE) team within Thomson Reuters is seeking Senior Software Engineers to build the core of that platform: the ingestion pipelines that turn content into searchable knowledge, the APIs that serve it to products and AI agents, and the cloud infrastructure that keeps it fast and reliable. Your work is what lets internal teams create, configure, and run search on their own, without waiting on a central team.

This is a full-ownership role. You design, build, test, deploy, and operate production systems at scale. We ship to production constantly, treat delivery friction as an engineering problem to solve, and use AI-assisted development as a primary tool. Senior Engineers here hold design authority within their scope, share expertise across the team, and mentor more junior engineers.

Key Responsibilities:

Build the platform

Design, build, and test platform services across document ingestion, search indexing, and query APIs, using the language best suited to the problem (for example Python, Java, or Go).

Build reliable pipeline components that move documents through parsing, chunking, enrichment, and indexing, using proven patterns for retries, dead-letter queues, and idempotent processing.

Build self-service platform APIs that let client teams configure search systems, manage index lifecycles, and monitor ingestion health.

Design retrieval interfaces for products and AI agents with predictable contracts, explicit latency budgets, and result payloads sized for LLM context windows.

Contribute to the move from OpenSearch to Vespa, including schema migrations and zero-downtime index promotion.

Instrument retrieval components so offline evaluation and LLM-as-judge grading can compare pipeline versions and measure search quality.

Operate what you build

Take part in the on-call rotation and own incidents in your scope, from triage and root cause to post-mortem and systemic fixes.

Add logging, metrics, and distributed tracing to your components, including trace-level visibility into agentic retrieval paths, and help define SLOs.

Remove delivery friction wherever you find it: slow deployments, flaky tests, and painful local workflows. Use AI-assisted tools fluently and share what works.

Lead and collaborate

Take technical direction for assigned projects, break customer and product requirements into executable work, and mentor more junior engineers through review and pairing.

Work with TR Labs and research scientists to bring new search capabilities, such as embedding models, chunking strategies, and re-ranking, into production in a well-tested and observable way.

Work with client teams to understand how they use the platform and turn their feedback into platform improvements.

Required Qualifications:

5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend or data infrastructure systems, with end-to-end ownership of features and components. A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience

Strong programming skills in at least one of Python, Java, Go, or an equivalent language, and the judgment to choose the right tool for the job

Solid distributed systems fundamentals: you understand how queues, streaming pipelines, and distributed data stores fail, and you design for it

Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform (AWS preferred) and infrastructure as code

Operational ownership: on-call, incident response, and observability, with the view that building and operating are inseparable

Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders

Preferred qualifications:

Production experience with a search engine such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Vespa, or Solr, including writing queries, designing indexes, or operating clusters

Experience with Kafka or another event streaming platform

Experience integrating AI services, such as embedding, re-ranking, and RAG components, with sound error handling and fallbacks

Exposure to agentic retrieval patterns, such as multi-hop search or designing tool interfaces for agents

Familiarity with search evaluation and analytics, including relevance experiments and query log analysis

What Success Looks Like

In the first 90 days

Ramp up on the platform's architecture and operations, take on-call responsibility, and contribute production code within the first month

Deliver one meaningful feature or reliability improvement with end-to-end ownership, from design through deployment and monitoring

Build strong working relationships and show the team's operating principles in practice

In the first year

Own a significant platform component end to end, with design authority, health monitoring, and steady improvements to reliability and performance

Build technical depth in at least one domain (ingestion, indexing, query APIs, or infrastructure) and take on more complex, cross-functional work

Strengthen the team's engineering culture through code review, documentation, operational rigor, and mentoring

#LI-SM2

• 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.

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