Job Description
Thomson Reuters is looking for a recognized technical authority to set the direction for how the world's top law firms and corporate legal departments adopt AI. CoCounsel is trusted by over 20,000 law firms and corporate legal departments, including the majority of top US courts and Am Law 100 firms, and is used by one million professionals across 107 countries.
As the senior-most individual contributor on the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, you will define and drive the technology strategy and roadmap for designing, building, and operating bespoke AI solutions. You will own the team's most complex, highest-risk, and most strategically important engagements, working alongside Staff Software Engineers and Architects, Senior Legal AI Engineers, and AI Solution Engineers. You will partner with Product, Engineering, and business leadership to align FDE work with CoCounsel's long-term objectives.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role with broad influence. You will make high-stakes architectural decisions with autonomy, raise the engineering bar across the team and beyond, and help make the team AI-native in everything it does.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Vision and Strategy
Define and drive the long-term technical vision and strategy for FDE, including vision documents, technology requirements, and roadmaps tied to product and business objectives.
Lead the selection, evaluation, and adoption of technologies, frameworks, and patterns, and build consensus across teams.
Identify where emerging capabilities such as agentic systems, MCP and A2A interoperability, and new model and orchestration patterns could cause a transformational shift, and communicate the opportunities and trade-offs to senior leadership.
Contribute to cross-functional and cross-business-unit engineering strategy, standards, and, where appropriate, patents.
Architecture and Delivery of Complex AI Systems
Lead complex, high-risk, high-visibility AI initiatives from concept through production, staying hands-on in design, prototyping, and code for the hardest problems.
Architect scalable, secure AI systems that integrate with client environments, including document management systems, enterprise platforms, and legal technology ecosystems.
Design RAG pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, event-driven backends, and agentic workflows using CoCounsel, Westlaw, and Practical Law capabilities, plus third-party AI APIs.
Build reusable AI components, frameworks, and solution templates that scale delivery across the team.
Set standards for MLOps/LLMOps, Infrastructure as Code, and CI/CD so delivery is secure, repeatable, and fast.
Identify weaknesses in existing designs and drive remedies.
Quality, Observability, and Trust
Set the strategy for AI monitoring and observability, covering performance, output quality, latency, cost, and production reliability risk.
Own LLM evaluation, including accuracy, hallucination risk, citation quality, A/B testing, and red-teaming, and define quality benchmarks grounded in real legal workflows.
Ensure every solution meets ethical AI, data protection, and enterprise security requirements.
Drive operational excellence across the software development lifecycle, including post-launch measurement.
Client and Stakeholder Engagement
Act as the senior technical voice in discovery on high-value engagements, scoping use cases, shaping architectures, and building credibility with legal and technical executives.
Present complex technical concepts and strategy to audiences from engineers to business unit executives, and negotiate solutions between key stakeholders.
Work with legal SMEs to translate professional reasoning and domain heuristics into pipeline design, evaluation criteria, and benchmarks.
Anticipate customer and market needs and feed field insights back into the product roadmap.
Leadership, Mentorship, and Culture
Mentor and coach Staff, Senior, and Lead engineers, and indirectly lead a small team of engineers…