Senior Software Engineer - AI, CoCounsel FDE

Job Description

Are you a hands-on AI engineer who wants to build the next generation of legal AI solutions from the ground up? Do you thrive taking an architectural blueprint and turning it into a robust, production-ready system that lawyers actually rely on? Join Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering team - a high-impact group working at the frontier of legal AI, where your code ships directly to law firms and corporate legal departments and your engineering shapes how the world's leading legal professionals work. With one million professionals now relying on CoCounsel across 107 countries, the work you do here will matter.

As a Senior Software Engineer – AI, you will work side-by-side with the AI Solutions Architect, Senior Legal AI Engineers, and fellow AI engineers to design, build, and deploy bespoke AI solutions from zero to one for law firms and corporate legal departments. You are a strong, independent engineer who takes solution designs and architectural direction and drives them all the way to production - owning your work end to end, contributing to solution design, and bringing deep AI engineering craft to every engagement. This is not a back-office engineering role. You will participate in technical discovery with clients, contribute to solution design, develop tailored AI systems, and own the quality of what you ship - ensuring the AI we deploy consistently meets the high trust standards of legal professionals. Your architecture will be reviewed and shaped in partnership with the AI Solutions Architect, giving you a strong technical support structure while you focus on building.

Key Responsibilities

Solution Design & Engineering

• Design and implement AI-powered solutions tailored to law firm and corporate legal workflows, including contract review, litigation support, discovery automation, and regulatory analysis.
• Work within architectural frameworks set by the AI Solutions Architect to build scalable, secure, and maintainable AI systems.
• Architect RAG pipelines, custom AI agents, and multi-component systems that integrate securely into client environments, including document management systems and enterprise platforms.
• Build and configure multi-step agentic workflows leveraging CoCounsel, Westlaw, and Practical Law capabilities, as well as third-party AI APIs and enterprise integrations.
• Implement Agent-to-Agent (A2A) workflows and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations to enable interoperability between AI agents and external tools, data sources, and enterprise systems.
• Design and deploy bespoke automation pipelines and integration scripts tailored to each customer's use case.
• Implement MLOps and LLMOps practices to support scalable, maintainable deployment of AI solutions in production.

Observability, Quality & Trust

• Implement monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions to track LLM performance, latency, token usage, and system health in production.
• Leverage AI evaluation platforms (such as LangSmith, Braintrust, or Weights & Biases) to assess model outputs, track evaluation metrics over time, and surface quality regressions across deployed solutions.
• Contribute to LLM evaluation efforts - assessing model outputs for accuracy, citation quality, hallucination risk, and fitness for high-stakes legal use - in partnership with the AI Solutions Architect and product team.
• Develop and maintain evaluation benchmarks, test suites, and red-teaming protocols grounded in real legal workflows, and translate findings into structured input for product and engineering roadmaps.
• Ensure all solutions comply with ethical AI principles, data protection standards, and enterprise security requirements.

Discovery & Client Engagement

• Participate in technical discovery on client engagements - contributing to use case scoping, solution design discussions, and early-stage prototyping.
• Translate complex legal workflows, pain points, and client goals into concrete engineering tasks and implementation plans.
• Conduct technical demonstrations and early-stage prototyping to support solution design and client confidence.
• Build trust with legal professionals through fluency in legal terminology, workflows, and the real-world constraints of legal practice.
• Work directly with legal SMEs to understand their professional reasoning and judgement, and translate that domain knowledge into AI pipeline design, evaluation criteria, and benchmarks.

Technical Contribution & Collaboration

• Collaborate closely with Senior Legal AI Engineers, the AI Solutions Architect, and fellow AI engineers to deliver high-quality solutions across engagements.
• Contribute to team knowledge-sharing, internal documentation, and reusable solution templates that accelerate delivery across the team.
• Evaluate and prototype cutting-edge AI techniques, including emerging agentic frameworks, MCP-based tool integrations, and prompt engineering approaches, to improve output quality across diverse legal use cases.
• Stay current with AI research and the rapidly evolving legal AI landscape, bringing new ideas and approaches into the team.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a strong foundation in system design, distributed systems, and clean architecture.
• At least 2 years of hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML solutions in production, including LLM-powered applications.
• Proficiency in orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI, or AutoGen, and solid understanding of RAG architectures and vector databases.
• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) workflow patterns for building interoperable, tool-augmented AI systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python (FastAPI or equivalent) and experience building RESTful and async, event-driven architectures.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, CDK, or equivalent).
• Experience with observability and monitoring stacks (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or similar) for production AI systems.
• Experience with AI evaluation platforms (e.g., LangSmith, Langfuse, Braintrust, Weights & Biases) and the ability to contribute to structured evaluation pipelines for LLM-powered applications.
• Strong background in secure API development, including authentication and authorization protocols (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT).
• Strong prompt engineering skills - ability to design, iterate, and optimize LLM prompts for specialized domain tasks.
• Demonstrated fluency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot) - this teams operates AI-natively across all engineering workflows, not just client deliverables.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage credibly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, including legal professionals.
• Comfort working independently, navigating ambiguity, and contributing meaningfully in client-facing workshops and discovery sessions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Fluency in legal terminology and demonstrated experience working directly within or alongside legal teams.
• Experience in a regulated industry - legal, fintech, or healthcare - and familiarity with associated compliance and data privacy requirements.
• Experience with legal platforms, document management systems, and legal technology ecosystems.
• Experience with container orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Knowledge of MLOps and LLMOps practices for production AI system lifecycle management.
• Understanding of the scaling, limitations, and fine-tuning of transformer-based models.
• Familiarity with emerging AI interoperability standards and protocols, including MCP ecosystem tooling and A2A communication patterns.
• A portfolio of projects demonstrating in skill building complex, production-grade AI solutions.

What You'll Be Part Of Over 20,000 law firms and corporate legal departments, and the majority of top US courts and Am Law 100 firms, already trust CoCounsel. CoCounsel functions as an execution layer embedded within professional platforms, combining foundation models, proprietary AI engineering, proprietary content, and domain expertise to complete multi-step workflows end to end. The Forward Deployed Engineering team sits at the sharp end of that trust - closest to clients, closest to the hardest problems, and closest to the future of how legal work gets done. If you want to build AI that lawyers actually rely on in the highest-stakes moments of their work, this is the team.

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 $136,000 USD - $253,000 USD. For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $118,400 USD - $219,800 USD. For Ontario, Canada, the base compensation range for this role is $100,000 CAD - $145,000 CAD.

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