Lead AI Retrieval Engineer for Search Systems

Thomson Reuters; Eagan (MN); On-site; USD 137,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid Work Model

Mental Health Days

Tuition Reimbursement

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Flexible vacation

Job summary

Thomson Reuters in the United States is seeking a senior research engineer to own end-to-end delivery of large-scale search and retrieval systems. You will lead a small squad, partner with applied scientists, and push production-grade implementations from model to deployment.

You will design architectures for ranking, ingestion, and hybrid retrieval, and ensure robust, scalable APIs on AWS. This role emphasizes evidence-based evaluation and impactful, measurable improvements in retrieval quality.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 7+ years building production software, including search, retrieval, or ranking systems you shipped and owned.
• Proven track record leading technical projects and delivering through other engineers.
• Deep hands-on production expertise in OpenSearch or Vespa, or comparable depth in Elasticsearch/Solr/Lucene.
• Rigor with evidence: designing search experiments and offline/online evaluation.
• Outstanding Python software engineering across ingestion, retrieval, and evaluation.
• AI-native development: integrate agentic tooling with caution and judgment.
• Designing, operating, and scaling production APIs on AWS.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery of significant search and retrieval projects, accountable for outcome, quality and timeline.
• Act as technical lead for a squad of 3-5 engineers: set direction, break down work, review designs and code.
• Partner closely with applied scientists, build on their models and research directions, and feed production evidence back into science.
• Run the exploration POC value productionization loop, and decide what to try next, including what not to try.
• Design and build retrieval architectures, ingestion and indexing pipelines, and ranking systems on OpenSearch and Vespa.
• Build the retrieval infrastructure that agentic AI workflows depend on, including tool-facing APIs and RAG pipelines.

Skills

Leadership

Python

OpenSearch / Vespa

AWS

Information retrieval

AI tooling

Collaboration

Production software

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

Tools

OpenSearch

Vespa

Elasticsearch/Solr/Lucene

Python ecosystems

Job description

Thomson Reuters in the United States is seeking a senior research engineer to own end-to-end delivery of large-scale search and retrieval systems. You will lead a small squad, partner with applied scientists, and push production-grade implementations from model to deployment.

You will design architectures for ranking, ingestion, and hybrid retrieval, and ensure robust, scalable APIs on AWS. This role emphasizes evidence-based evaluation and impactful, measurable improvements in retrieval quality.