Staff Software Engineer, Search Control Plane

Staff Software Engineer, Search Control Plane

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 is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for a highly impactful role at the foundation of the search platform. You will design and deliver a fully managed, highly scalable, and reliable control plane that brings a search system to life and manages its full lifecycle at the click of a button. That means automating the provisioning of Kubernetes, Kafka, ingestion pipelines, and the data plane for query and ingest, with sovereignty and observability built in from the start, and owning the infrastructure that runs every search index.

Every search system that moves onto the platform depends on what you build, so your work sets how quickly and safely teams across Thomson Reuters can create, change, and operate search on their own. Staff Engineers here define, build, deploy, and operate what they ship. We ship to production constantly, treat delivery friction as a standing engineering priority, and use AI-assisted development as the norm.

Key Responsibilities:

Control plane and lifecycle

Design, build, and own the control plane that creates, configures, upgrades, promotes, and retires search systems on demand, with full lifecycle management at the click of a button.

Own automated provisioning of everything a search system needs: Kubernetes workloads, Kafka messaging, ingestion pipelines, and the data plane for query and ingest.

Provide the lifecycle workflows for schema changes, reingest, index switch, and rollback, with status that tells callers when an index is ready.

Build sovereignty into the platform: tenant data isolation, enterprise identity and role-based access, and the controls that keep each customer's data within the boundaries it requires.

Design the configuration data model and persistence layer for system definitions, component registries, index lifecycle state, and audit history, built to scale across tenants and regions.

Set the platform's interface standards, including versioned, backward-compatible contracts and clear documentation, and expose what evaluation and experimentation workflows need.

Search index infrastructure and reliability

Own the infrastructure behind every search index (Vespa and OpenSearch): provisioning, capacity planning, health, backup and restore, and the on-call path.

Set capacity budgets and limits for reindexing and backfills, in partnership with the retrieval owner who decides when and how they run.

Make observability a first-class capability and own platform SLOs for availability, query latency, ingestion throughput, and document freshness, with tracing and alerting across provisioning, ingestion, and the data plane, including agentic retrieval paths.

Own the platform's cloud infrastructure as code across environments and the CI/CD pipeline, and drive down delivery friction so the team can ship safely and often.

Build security in from the start: least-privilege access, secrets management, encryption at rest and in transit (including customer-managed keys), audit logging, and compliance.

Own cost and performance planning as tenants, content, and query traffic grow.

Operate what you build: on-call, incident response, and post-mortems that lead to systemic fixes.

Technical leadership

Set architectural principles and design patterns for the control plane and infrastructure, and act as the technical authority other teams turn to.

Lead cross-team projects, set priorities, and advise leadership on complex infrastructure and security decisions.

Partner with client teams to understand their experience adopting the platform, and feed what you learn into the roadmap.

Mentor Senior and mid-level engineers, and help the team use AI-assisted development effectively.

Required qualifications:

8+ years of software engineering experience with progression to staff-level scope, including ownership of a functional area and leadership of cross-functional projects. A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience

Experience designing, building, and operating production platform or infrastructure services at scale, with strong distributed systems fundamentals, in a language such as Go, Java, Python, or an equivalent

Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred), including Kubernetes or another container orchestrator and infrastructure as code

Production experience operating a search engine such as Vespa, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch, including capacity planning and index lifecycle

Operational rigor: SLO definition, observability, on-call leadership, and learning from incidents

Fluency with AI-assisted development tools

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience designing APIs consumed by multiple teams, with versioning, access control, and a strong developer experience

Multi-tenant platform security: identity integration, role-based access control, encryption, and customer-managed keys

Experience operating Kafka or another distributed messaging platform in production

Experience building internal developer platforms where documentation and ease of adoption are treated as product concerns

Tracing and observability for non-deterministic or agentic workflows

What Success Looks Like

In the first 90 days

Learn the platform's current infrastructure, index footprint, and operational posture, including known gaps in capacity, reliability, security, and developer experience

Build relationships with key client teams and the retrieval owner, and understand their pain points

Take on-call ownership for your area and begin delivering the highest-leverage near-term improvements

In the first year

Deliver a materially improved control plane: any team can create, change, and promote a search system on its own, with strong multi-tenant isolation and a better developer experience

Establish end-to-end SLO coverage and capacity plans across platform services and search indexes, with alerting, runbooks, and architecture decision records

Own and deliver a major infrastructure initiative, such as customer-managed keys, multi-region readiness, or agentic observability

Become the recognized technical authority for the control plane and search infrastructure

#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 a