Senior Manager, Software Engineering -Search Platform

About the role

The CoCounsel Legal Integrations team is seeking a Senior Manager, Software Engineering to lead the engineering team responsible for building, operating, and evolving the shared search platform at Thomson Reuters.

This platform is the foundation of TR’s search capability — a managed, self-service infrastructure that allows internal client teams to configure, deploy, and iterate on production search systems in days rather than months, accelerating the delivery of high-quality search experiences across TR’s legal, tax, and professional products.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end platform engineering roadmap — spanning document ingestion and processing, search engine management, query APIs, platform control-plane APIs, and the cloud infrastructure that ties them together — balancing new capability delivery with rigorous management of reliability and technical debt.
• Drive API-first, self-service architectural thinking: ensure that every capability the platform delivers is accessible via a clean, versioned, well-documented API, and that internal client teams can configure and operate search systems without direct involvement from the platform team.
• Migrate from current search infrastructure to the platform’s strategic search engine, including Vespa adoption, while maintaining zero-downtime operations on existing production systems throughout the transition.
• Promote full-stack operational ownership across the team: the team defines, builds, tests, deploys, scales, and operates what it ships — establishing on-call rotations, incident response practices, SLO definitions, and reliability engineering as first-class team responsibilities, not afterthoughts.
• Champion full-stack operational ownership across the team: the team defines, builds, tests, deploys, scales, and operates what it ships — establishing on-call rotations, incident response practices, SLO definitions, and reliability engineering as first-class team responsibilities, not afterthoughts.
• Partner closely with TR Labs to ensure that new retrieval techniques, embedding models, re-ranking approaches, and agentic search patterns have a clear, well-supported path from prototype to production within the platform’s architecture — including the infrastructure required to serve custom models in production with appropriate latency SLOs, versioning, and rollback capability.
• Oversee platform infrastructure including event streaming (Kafka/MSK), cloud services (AWS), observability tooling, and security controls including multi-tenant data isolation and customer-controlled encryption.
• Build a team culture where AI-assisted development is the default and delivery friction is identified and eliminated aggressively — ensuring the team ships to production constantly and that process or tooling obstacles are treated as urgent engineering problems.
• Translate complex platform and search concepts to non-technical stakeholders — making the value and trade-offs of platform investments legible to product managers and business leaders.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies — search engines, vector databases, streaming frameworks, AI development tooling, agentic retrieval patterns, orchestration tools — with a clear-eyed assessment of production-readiness and operational implications.
• Cultivate a strong, productive partnership with TR Labs — engaging early in the research and experimentation lifecycle to shape platform requirements, co-develop integration patterns, and ensure that promising AI capabilities have a clear and well-supported path to production.
• Collaborate closely with product management, TR Labs, and consuming engineering teams to align the platform roadmap with business priorities across CoCounsel, Westlaw, and the broader TR product portfolio.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a technical leadership or engineering management role.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating large-scale distributed data systems — event streaming, data pipelines, or search/indexing infrastructure — at production scale.
• Strong platform and systems thinking: a track record of building shared infrastructure consumed by multiple teams, with a product mindset toward developer experience and internal customer satisfaction.
• Proven ability to build high-velocity engineering teams: reducing delivery friction, enabling constant production deployments, and embedding AI-assisted development practices as a team norm.
• Advanced knowledge of distributed systems design, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), API design, and software architecture.
• Proficiency in Python and strong software engineering fundamentals, including DevOps practices and observability.
• Familiarity with information retrieval, search systems, or vector/hybrid search concepts sufficient to make sound architectural decisions and partner effectively with search engineers and research scientists.
• Awareness of AI ethics, governance, and responsible technology deployment.
• Strong leadership skills: proficiency in agile methodologies, excellent communication, and the ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and science teams.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with search engines such as Vespa, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or Solr.
• Experience building multi-tenant platform infrastructure with strong data isolation, customer-managed encryption, or other enterprise security requirements.
• Experience partnering with AI/ML research teams to operationalize retrieval models, embedding pipelines, or re-ranking systems.

Skills

• Systems thinking and platform architecture.
• API design and cloud infrastructure.
• DevOps practices and observability.
• Information retrieval and search systems.
• AI ethics and governance.
• Agile methodologies and communication skills.

Benefits

Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role) 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 wellness.