Principal Software Engineer – AI – CoCounsel Audit

About the role

Own the AI backbone: You will be the principal engineer responsible for the backend and orchestration layer powering AI agents, conversations, workspaces, and knowledge base across CoCounsel for Audit. Shape the company's AI platform and patterns: Define patterns for building MCP servers, designing agents, novel uses of LLMs, experimentation, and scalable infrastructure. Your decisions will influence multiple product lines, not just a single feature.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-quarter initiatives that cut across AI, product, and infra (e.g., a new orchestration layer, a low-latency retrieval system, or a unified knowledge base).
• Mentor staff and senior engineers, raising the bar on system design, code quality, and AI integration practices across the org.
• Help shape the team’s roadmap, technical strategy, and engineering culture – from experimentation practices to testing, rollout, and postmortems.
• Help define and lead the platform integration strategy across new and existing Thomson Reuters audit systems to provide world class content and solutions for our customers.
• Design and own AI-first backend systems
• Architect and implement backend services (Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, Vercel) that power generative AI agents, complex workflows (e.g., tax filing, advisory, audit), and document-centric experiences.
• Build and evolve AI orchestration: routing, tool calling, MCP servers, multi-step workflows, safety and guardrails, and robust error handling around third-party LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others).
• Scale, reliability, and performance
• Design for high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads: caching, queuing, rate-limiting, model failover, and cost/performance tradeoffs.
• Work with large-scale data: millions of documents, retrieval and search, vector stores, and indexing strategies tailored to tax and accounting use cases.
• Establish and refine SLOs, observability, and incident response for AI systems that must be correct, auditable, and trustworthy in professional workflows.

Requirements

Required Experience & Skills:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Related Field, or Equivalent Experience
• 8-10+ years of experience in backend development, building scalable web services and APIs
• Deep Python expertise and experience with production systems using frameworks like FastAPI (or similar), relational databases (PostgreSQL or equivalent), and a major cloud provider (AWS preferred)
• Strong background in distributed systems: data modeling, API contracts, observability, resilience patterns, and performance tuning under load
• Proven track record owning large, complex projects end-to-end: architecture, execution, rollout, and long-term operation
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with product, design, and ML teams in a fast-moving environment
• Demonstrated interest in AI systems and new engineering paradigms: LLMs, agents, retrieval, or similar – you care about what “AI-native” software should look like

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Hands-on experience integrating LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) into production applications, including prompt/response management, cost controls, and safety considerations.
• Experience with AI-adjacent infrastructure: vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, or custom retrieval pipelines.
• Opinions and experience around automated testing, reliability, and release practices for systems with nondeterministic model behavior.
• Prior experience in domains where correctness, auditability, and compliance matter (fintech, tax, audit, legal, or similar), or strong interest in applying AI in those contexts.

Benefits

• Hybrid Work Model
• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance
• Career Development and Growth
• Industry Competitive Benefits
• Culture
• Social Impact
• Make a Real-World Impact

Pay

$158,900 USD - $295,100 USD

Schedule

Not specified