Lead Software Engineer, AI

CAN002 Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd; Zug; Hybrid; CHF 148,000 - 198,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid Work Model

Flex My Way

Grow My Way

Headspace app

Retirement savings

Tuition reimbursement

Employee incentive programs

Mental Health Days off

Job summary

Thomson Reuters is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to define architecture for production AI agent systems, integrating with modern LLM APIs and agent SDKs. You will steer cross-cutting initiatives, design scalable platforms, and ensure reliability.

The role emphasizes hands-on leadership, RFCs, feature flag delivery, and mentorship, with a hybrid work model and opportunities to shape how AI-native tooling transforms legal workflows.

Qualifications

• Experience building AI-native agent systems in production.
• Hands-on with LLM APIs and agent frameworks.
• Ability to mentor senior engineers and drive architecture.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction across high-priority AI agent initiatives.
• Architect production AI agent systems on LLM APIs and orchestration infra.
• Design observability, evaluation pipelines, and deployment practices.
• Lead RFCs/ADRs and cross-team reviews.
• Mentor a senior engineering team and shape engineering culture.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

LLM / AI agent frameworks

Observability & monitoring

Tools

AWS Bedrock AgentCore

LLM SDKs

Job description

What if the AI agents you architect empower legal professionals to act with sharper judgment and greater leverage, using tools that are themselves AI-native and multiply what you and your team can ship? Our agent platform team builds and ships using AI-native engineering practices: agentic coding tools that let a small, senior group move at a pace well beyond traditional engineering throughput. That's how this team builds the infrastructure, tooling, and observability our AI agents need to run reliably at scale, often several efforts at once. We're also in the middle of rethinking how we deploy and operate agents in production, pushing quality and safety checks earlier in the pipeline and raising our bar for release velocity and stability. As our Lead AI Engineer, you'll set technical direction across that portfolio, moving fluidly between the initiatives that matter most and shaping how a highly capable, senior team builds the next generation of legal AI agents.

About the role

Set technical architecture and direction across the team's highest-priority initiatives, spanning core agent infrastructure, new internal tooling, and production reliability. Provide hands-on technical leadership wherever it matters most, flexing across the team's highest-priority initiatives rather than being locked into a single fixed workstream. Architect and build production AI agent systems on top of modern LLM APIs, agent SDKs, and orchestration/runtime infrastructure, designed to scale and integrate cleanly with existing platform services. Design agent observability and evaluation practices (tracing, automated evals, and quality/drift detection) so regressions in agent behavior get caught before they reach customers. Advance how the team deploys and operates AI agents in production, deepening practices like progressive/feature-flagged rollout and earlier-stage quality signals so releases get both faster and safer over time. Drive cross-cutting design reviews and technical decisions (RFCs/ADRs) to keep new systems coherent as multiple initiatives move in parallel. Mentor and raise the technical bar for a senior engineering team, including how they use AI-native, agentic development practices to multiply their own output. Partner with product and engineering leadership to translate strategic priorities into concrete system architecture and sequencing decisions.

About You

Extensive experience architecting and shipping production software systems, including hands-on experience building AI/LLM-powered products or agentic systems (not solely classical ML/data science). Direct experience building with modern LLM APIs, agent frameworks/SDKs, or agent-to-tool integration protocols. A track record of setting technical direction across multiple concurrent initiatives, not just delivering one project end-to-end. Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including distributed systems design, service architecture, and cloud infrastructure. Experience designing for production reliability and observability: monitoring, evaluation pipelines, incident response, and quality regression detection. Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and influence technical culture and practices. Comfort operating with high autonomy on a fast-moving, senior-heavy team that builds with AI-native/agentic engineering practices. Experience leading architecture for developer-facing platforms, plugin/extension systems, or integration ecosystems. Familiarity with progressive delivery practices (feature flagging, phased rollout, blue/green deployment) at scale. Experience pushing a team toward elite software delivery practices: progressive delivery, shift-left quality/testing, and the kind of engineering discipline reflected in metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate. Experience with managed agent runtime infrastructure (e.g., AWS Bedrock AgentCore or similar). Domain expertise in legal, regulated, professional-services, or other fiduciary domains is a plus, but not required.

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment 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 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.

DISCLAIMER

The above information in this description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.

About Us

Thomson Reuters informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. We serve professionals across legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media. Our products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions, and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a world leading provider of trusted journalism and news. We are powered by the talents of 26,000 employees across more than 70 countries, where everyone has a chance to contribute and grow professionally in flexible work environments. At a time when objectivity, accuracy, fairness, and transparency are under attack, we consider it our duty to pursue them.

To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. Thomson Reuters is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer providing a drug-free workplace. We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law.