Software Engineer - AI – CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering

Are you excited about building AI solutions that help legal professionals work faster, smarter, and with greater confidence? Do you enjoy operating at the intersection of engineering, legal workflows, and real-world client problems? Join Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering team — a high-impact group focused on delivering practical legal AI solutions to law firms and corporate legal departments. With one million professionals relying on CoCounsel across 107 countries, the work you do here will have meaningful impact.

What You'll Be Part Of

Over 20,000 law firms and corporate legal departments, along with the majority of top US courts and Am Law 100 firms, already trust CoCounsel. The Forward Deployed Engineering team works directly on high-value, real-world legal AI problems — partnering closely with clients and internal teams to shape how AI is adopted in legal practice. If you want to help build AI systems that legal professionals can trust in important moments of their work, this is the team.

About The Role

As a Software Engineer - AI, you will partner with AI Solution Engineers, Architects, and senior technical teammates to design, build, and deploy AI-powered solutions for legal customers. You will help translate legal workflows and business needs into reliable technical solutions that combine foundation models, proprietary AI capabilities, and legal-domain understanding. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys hands-on engineering, client-facing problem solving, and applied AI development.

• Contribute to technical discovery, solution delivery, prototyping, integrations, and evaluation of AI outputs for legal use cases.
• Play an important role in ensuring the systems we deploy are practical, accurate, secure, and aligned with the high standards required in legal environments.
• Support client engagements by participating in technical discovery sessions, gathering requirements, and helping scope legal AI use cases.
• Work with legal and technical stakeholders to understand workflows, pain points, and desired outcomes.
• Assist with demonstrations, proofs of concept, and early-stage prototypes that inform solution design.
• Develop working knowledge of legal terminology, legal processes, and operational constraints in law firms and corporate legal departments.
• Design, develop, and implement AI-powered solutions for legal workflows such as contract review, litigation support, discovery automation, and regulatory analysis.
• Build and support retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, agentic workflows, and other multi-component AI systems.
• Configure and integrate solutions using CoCounsel, Westlaw, Practical Law, and other enterprise platforms where applicable.
• Develop automation scripts, APIs, and integration components tailored to customer environments and use cases.
• Collaborate with senior engineers and architects to ensure solutions are scalable, maintainable, and secure.
• Help evaluate LLM outputs for legal accuracy, relevance, citation quality, consistency, and hallucination risk.
• Contribute to test cases, benchmarks, and evaluation workflows based on real legal tasks.
• Partner with internal teams to validate new capabilities against real-world legal use cases.
• Support compliance with responsible AI principles, data privacy requirements, and enterprise security standards.
• Translate functional requirements into technical tasks and contribute to implementation planning.
• Document solutions, reusable components, and engineering best practices for internal use.
• Experiment with prompting strategies, workflow improvements, and emerging AI techniques to improve legal use-case performance.
• Stay current with developments in AI engineering, legal technology, and applied LLM systems.

Requirements

You’re fit for the role of Software Engineer - AI if your background includes:

• 2–4 years of software engineering experience, including experience building applications or integrations in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with Python and familiarity with modern AI/ML tooling and APIs.
• Understanding of core machine learning and LLM concepts, including prompt design, evaluation, and workflow orchestration.
• Experience integrating external APIs, automating workflows, or building data pipelines.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams, including legal, product, and engineering stakeholders.
• Comfortable working in fast-paced environments, learning quickly, and contributing across multiple projects.

Qualifications

Preferred qualifications include:

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Familiarity with containerization, deployment workflows, and modern software development practices.
• Experience using AI platforms or APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar providers.
• Exposure to vector databases, embeddings, search, or retrieval systems.
• Experience working on AI solutions in legal, compliance, financial, healthcare, or other regulated/professional domains.
• Portfolio or project examples demonstrating practical use of LLMs, automations, or applied AI systems.

Benefits

• Hybrid Work Model: Flexible hybrid working environment for office-based roles.
• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: Flex My Way policies, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, and two company-wide Mental Health Days off.
• Career Development and Growth: Culture of continuous learning and skill development with Grow My Way programming.
• Industry Competitive Benefits: Comprehensive benefit plans including flexible vacation, retirement savings with company match, tuition reimbursement, and employee incentive programs.
• Wellbeing Resources: Access to the Headspace app and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
• Culture: Globally recognized for inclusion, belonging, and work-life balance.
• Social Impact: Two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities for pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.

Pay

The base compensation range for this role varies by location:

• New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Irvine, CA; McLean, VA; Washington, DC: $109,000 USD - $203,000 USD.
• Other eligible US locations: $94,900 USD - $176,300 USD.
• Ontario, Canada: $80,000 CAD - $100,000 CAD.

Base pay is positioned within the range based on knowledge, skills, and experience, with consideration for internal equity. This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on enterprise and individual performance.