Lead Applied Scientist, AI for Legal & Tax Solutions

TRSS; Ann Arbor (MI); On-site; USD 148,000 - 274,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible vacation

Mental health days

Tuition reimbursement

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Thomson Reuters Labs (TR Labs) seeks a Lead Applied Scientist to define research strategy and steer AI/ML roadmaps across multiple product features. You will lead initiatives from prototyping to production, driving innovation in legal reasoning, document understanding, and knowledge graphs while mentoring scientists.

You will translate complex customer problems into scalable AI solutions, influence product roadmaps, and collaborate with product, engineering, and business teams.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master's degree with equivalent industry experience in CS, ML, or related field.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience building production IR, NLP, ML, or GenAI systems.
• Demonstrated experience leading through others in cross-functional teams to deliver end-to-end AI capabilities.
• Strong product mindset, with the ability to translate complex customer problems into successful AI applications.
• Proven ability to demonstrate novel methods that influence product roadmaps and business outcomes.
• Outstanding communication and analytical skills.
• Deep expertise in RAG architectures, agentic frameworks, tool-using systems, and evaluation methodologies.
• Publications at top-tier venues (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD).
• Experience delivering production code with well-managed software/MLOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Define the research strategy for focus areas and align with the AI/ML roadmap across product features.
• Lead high-impact initiatives from early experimentation through production-ready AI capabilities.
• Drive innovation in legal reasoning, document understanding, and knowledge graphs.
• Design, evaluate, and advance RAG architectures and tool-using systems for complex use cases.
• Establish best practices, evaluation methodologies, and technical standards.
• Understand customer problems and translate into AI solutions.
• Show how novel methods influence product roadmaps and business outcomes.
• Lead stakeholder engagement across product, engineering, and business teams.
• Mentor scientists and grow scientific depth and leadership.
• Provide thought leadership through internal and external channels.
• Deliver production-quality code with solid software/MLOps practices.

Skills

Research leadership

Strategic thinking

Communication skills

Analytical skills

Mentoring

Product mindset

Public speaking / publications

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in related field

Tools

Python

MLOps workflows

Job description

Thomson Reuters Labs (TR Labs) seeks a Lead Applied Scientist to define research strategy and steer AI/ML roadmaps across multiple product features. You will lead initiatives from prototyping to production, driving innovation in legal reasoning, document understanding, and knowledge graphs while mentoring scientists.

You will translate complex customer problems into scalable AI solutions, influence product roadmaps, and collaborate with product, engineering, and business teams.