Sr Data Scientist II

Relx Plc; Toronto; On-site; CAD 108,000 - 158,000; Full time

Job summary

LexisNexis Legal & Professional, part of RELX, is seeking a Senior Data Scientist II to advance LLM-powered drafting and retrieval solutions. You will build modular agentic AI systems, improve OpenSearch/Solr-backed search, and own production-grade Python applications with strong engineering rigor in a global environment.

The role emphasizes end-to-end ownership, logging, monitoring, and secure credential handling, with an emphasis on cross-functional collaboration and scalable, reliable AI

Qualifications

• Advanced Python proficiency demonstrated by designing, implementing, debugging, and refactoring production applications.
• Strong command of Python fundamentals, data structures, algorithms, and design principles.
• Experience transforming prototypes into production-ready, modular systems.
• Knowledge of software design principles: separation of concerns, DI, interfaces, and configuration management.
• Experience with automated testing using pytest and mocking external services.
• Design resilient distributed applications with timeouts, retries, and graceful degradation.
• Production observability: structured logging, metrics, tracing, and incident troubleshooting.
• Ability to conduct rigorous code reviews focusing on correctness and reliability.
• End-to-end ownership from design to deployment and monitoring.
• Experience addressing production LLM concerns: validation, prompts, and cost controls.

Responsibilities

• Architect modular agentic applications with clear separation of retrieval, prompt construction, model invocation, tool execution, and orchestration.
• Refactor legacy Python code for readability, modularity, and performance.
• Own production readiness: validation, timeouts, retries, credentials handling, and security.
• Establish observability for LLM and retrieval workflows with logging, metrics, and tracing.
• Define interfaces and data contracts between system components.
• Write unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, including failure scenarios.
• Review code for architectural and operational risks and provide remediation guidance.
• Diagnose and optimize latency, memory usage, and retrieval performance.
• Apply data structures and algorithms to optimize tooling and costs.
• Participate in deployments, incidents, and ongoing reliability improvements.

Skills

Python proficiency

Python fundamentals

Production readiness

Software design

pytest

Distributed systems

Observability

Code review

Ownership

LLM safety

ruff

mypy

Pydantic

Evaluation framework

Guardrails

Tools

OpenSearch

Solr

Job description

Are you excited about shaping the next generation of AI-powered legal technology through generative AI, retrieval systems, and production‑grade machine learning? Do you enjoy building reliable, scalable applications that transform complex AI capabilities into impactful customer solutions?

About our Team LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 11,800 employees worldwide, is part of RELX (http://www.relx.com), a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. Our company has been a long-time leader in deploying AI and advanced technologies to the legal market to improve productivity and transform the overall business and practice of law, deploying ethical and powerful generative AI solutions with a flexible, multi-model approach that prioritizes using the best model from today’s top model creators for each individual legal use case. The company employs over 2,000 technologists, data scientists, and experts to develop, test, and validate solutions in line with RELX Responsible AI Principles (https://stories.relx.com/responsible-ai-principles/index.html).

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist II with deep expertise in Generative AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic AI systems, combined with strong software‑engineering fundamentals and demonstrated ownership of production applications. This role will focus on improving LLM‑powered drafting and retrieval solutions through advanced search, embeddings, reranking, evaluation, and production‑grade ML components. The successful candidate must be able to independently design, refactor, test, review, deploy, and support clean, reliable Python applications. This includes separating agent responsibilities, designing for failure, applying sound algorithmic reasoning, and establishing appropriate logging, monitoring, testing, and operational controls. The ideal candidate has advanced Python proficiency, experience with OpenSearch or Solr, success working in monorepo environments, and a strong record of cross‑functional delivery.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect modular agentic applications with clear separation among retrieval, prompt construction, model invocation, tool execution, state and history management, orchestration, validation, and response formatting.
• Independently refactor complex or legacy Python code to improve correctness, readability, modularity, extensibility, testability, and runtime performance.
• Own production readiness for AI components, including input validation, exception handling, timeout management, retries with backoff, fallback behavior, configuration management, and secure handling of credentials.
• Establish observability for LLM and retrieval workflows through structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, alerting, and actionable error reporting.
• Design clear interfaces and data contracts between retrieval, orchestration, model, and downstream application components.
• Write comprehensive unit, integration, regression, and end‑to‑end tests, including tests for failure modes, malformed model responses, empty retrieval results, and unavailable dependencies.
• Review Python and agentic application code, identify architectural and operational risks, and provide actionable feedback aligned with production engineering standards.
• Diagnose and optimize latency, memory usage, retrieval performance, token consumption, model cost, and application scalability.
• Apply appropriate data structures, algorithms, and computational‑complexity analysis when designing and optimizing solutions.
• Participate in production deployments, incident investigation, root‑cause analysis, remediation, and continuous reliability improvements.

Required Qualifications

• Advanced Python proficiency demonstrated through independently designing, implementing, debugging, testing, reviewing, and refactoring production applications.
• Strong command of Python fundamentals, standard data structures, common algorithms, object‑oriented and functional design principles, type annotations, and time and space complexity analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to transform prototype or experimental code into modular, maintainable, observable, and production‑ready systems.
• Strong understanding of software design principles, including separation of concerns, dependency injection, interface design, configuration management, and effective abstraction.
• Experience implementing automated unit, integration, regression, and end‑to‑end testing using tools such as pytest, including appropriate mocking of external services.
• Experience designing resilient distributed applications that account for timeouts, retries, rate limits, partial failures, malformed responses, idempotency, and graceful degradation.
• Experience with production observability, including structured logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and incident troubleshooting.
• Demonstrated ability to conduct rigorous code reviews and identify correctness, maintainability, performance, security, testing, and operational risks.
• Experience taking technical ownership of applications across their lifecycle, from design and experimentation through deployment, monitoring, incident response, and ongoing improvement.
• Strong understanding of production LLM concerns, including structured output validation, context management, model and tool failures, prompt versioning, token and cost controls, security, and evaluation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Python quality tooling such as pytest, ruff, mypy, profiling tools, and automated CI quality gates.
• Experience defining typed schemas and validating LLM inputs and outputs using tools such as Pydantic.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks for agentic systems, including task‑completion, retrieval‑quality, groundedness, hallucination, latency, reliability, and cost metrics.
• Experience implementing model fallbacks, tool‑use controls, guardrails, human‑in‑the‑loop workflows, and auditability for AI applications.
• Experience supporting production services and participating in incident response, root‑cause analysis, and post‑incident remediation.

The Successful Candidate Will

• Demonstrate senior‑level Python proficiency and sound computer‑science fundamentals.
• Treat correctness, maintainability, testing, resilience, security, and observability as core design requirements.
• Recognize architectural issues and improve code beyond simply making it functional.
• Independently review and refactor complex agentic application code.
• Make clear engineering tradeoffs involving quality, latency, scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Take end‑to‑end ownership from experimentation through production deployment and operational support.
• Communicate technical decisions and code‑review feedback clearly and constructively.
• Combine strong LLM and retrieval expertise with disciplined software‑engineering practices.

Work in a Way That Works for You

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation. We offer an appealing working prospect for our people. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and your long‑term goals.

Working Pattern

Working flexible hours - flexing the times when you work in the day to help you fit everything in and work when you are the most productive.

About the Business

LexisNexis Legal & Professional® provides legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics that help customers increase their productivity, improve decision‑making, achieve better outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis® and Nexis® services.

Primary Location

Base Pay Range: Canada - Toronto (Yonge St) $108,100 - $158,100 (CAD). This job is eligible for an annual incentive bonus. This posting is not for an immediate existing vacancy but for a future opportunity.

We are delighted to offer country specific benefits.

We know your well‑being and happiness are key to a long and successful career.

We are committed to providing a fair and accessible hiring process.

We are an equal‑opportunity employer: qualified applicants are considered for and treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship status, disability status, protected veteran status, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

USA Job Seekers: EEO Know Your Rights.

RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers, enabling them to make better decisions, get better results and be more productive. Our purpose is to benefit society by developing products that help researchers advance scientific knowledge; doctors and nurses improve the lives of patients; lawyers promote the rule of law and achieve justice and fair results for their clients; businesses and governments prevent fraud; consumers access financial services and get fair prices on insurance; and customers learn about markets and complete transactions. Our purpose guides our actions beyond the products that we develop. It defines us as a company. Every day across RELX our employees are inspired to undertake initiatives that make unique contributions to society and the communities in which we operate.