Senior Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

About The Role

This is an applied science position focused on designing, building, and deploying production-grade document understanding systems that power Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel. You will work across semantic chunking, document enrichment, and knowledge graph construction for complex legal, tax, and accounting content — delivering foundational intelligence that multiple product teams depend on at scale.

About You

• You hold a PhD or Master's in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field, with 5+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping document understanding, information extraction, or knowledge graph systems into production.
• You have hands-on depth across model development, distillation, evaluation, and deployment.
• You work independently, lead through influence in an applied research setting, and measure success by what ships and performs in production.

What You'll Do

• Design and deploy semantic chunking models for lengthy, non-uniformly structured legal documents with adjustable granularity across use cases.
• Build document enrichment systems that classify documents according to legal and customer-defined taxonomies and extract rich metadata.
• Develop LLM-based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link citations, entities, and legal concepts across diverse legal content.
• Build scalable synthetic data generation systems for model training, multi-hop query simulation, and hallucination-free answer generation.
• Apply knowledge distillation techniques to compress large models into latency-constrained, production-ready SLMs.
• Design evaluation frameworks — component-level and end-to-end — using expert annotation and synthetic data.
• Drive independent technical decisions on chunking strategy, classification approach, knowledge extraction methods, and multi-document reasoning architecture.
• Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines.
• Contribute to published research at venues such as ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, and KDD, and to intellectual property.

Required Qualifications

• You hold a PhD or Master's in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field.
• You have 5+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping document understanding, information extraction, or knowledge graph systems into production — not research-only experience.
• You have publications at venues such as ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent.
• You have experience leading through influence in an applied research setting.
• You have Production Python and experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and DeepSpeed.
• You have hands-on Production Depth Required in Document layout analysis and semantic chunking beyond fixed-size or paragraph-based methods.
• You have Publications in Legal document understanding, legal information extraction, or legal AI applications.
• You have Experience with Complex document structures common in legal content: nested hierarchies, cross-references, non-uniform formatting, and embedded elements.
• You have Knowledge graph frameworks for legal or enterprise applications.
• You have RAG and agentic workflows for enterprise knowledge systems.
• You have AzureML or AWS SageMaker.

Preferred Qualifications

• You have Legal document understanding, legal information extraction, or legal AI applications.
• You have Experience with Retrieval, QA, or analysis systems over large document collections.
• You have Knowledge graph frameworks for legal or enterprise applications.
• You have RAG and agentic workflows for enterprise knowledge systems.
• You have AzureML or AWS SageMaker.
• You have Experience with Complex document structures common in legal content: nested hierarchies, cross-references, non-uniform formatting, and embedded elements.
• You have Experience with Legal document understanding, legal information extraction, or legal AI applications.
• You have Experience with Complex document structures common in legal content: nested hierarchies, cross-references, non-uniform formatting, and embedded elements.
• You have Experience with Legal document understanding, legal information extraction, or legal AI applications.
• You have Experience with Complex document structures common in legal content: nested hierarchies, cross-references, non-uniform formatting, and embedded elements.

What’s in it For You?

• 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.

Thomson Reuters

• We comply with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. The base compensation range varies across locations.
• We offer a comprehensive benefits package to our employees.
• We offer market competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs, as well as a competitive 401k plan with company match.
• We offer 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.
• We offer additional benefits such as 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.
• We comply with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. The base compensation range varies across locations.
• The base compensation range for this role is $127,400 USD - $236,600 USD in any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted.
• The base compensation range for this role is $100,000 CAD - $145,000 CAD in Ontario, Canada.
• This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.
• This job posting will close 09/30/2026.