Lead Applied Scientist – Large-Scale Search

Reuters; New York (NY); On-site; USD 148,000 - 274,000; Full time

Job summary

Reuters is seeking an accomplished Lead Applied Scientist to own the design, development, and production deployment of large-scale search and information retrieval systems powering Westlaw, Practical Law, CoCounsel, and Thomson Reuters search experiences.

You will work across indexing, ranking, semantic retrieval, hybrid search, and retrieval optimization for complex legal, tax, and accounting content, collaborating with multiple product teams to deliver measurable impact.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Information Retrieval, AI, ML, NLP, or related field preferred.
• 8+ years of industry experience building production search, information retrieval, ranking, or recommendation systems.
• Publications at SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, WWW, or equivalent venues.
• Strong production Python skills and experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and distributed model development.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy search architectures supporting large-scale legal, tax, and enterprise content collections.
• Build and optimize ingestion pipelines that analyze, enrich, and prepare documents for retrieval.
• Develop ranking and re-ranking systems using traditional IR techniques and LLM-based approaches.
• Improve retrieval quality through semantic retrieval, hybrid retrieval, query understanding, and relevance optimization.
• Design evaluation frameworks for retrieval performance, relevance, ranking quality, and end-user outcomes.
• Lead technical decisions around indexing strategies, retrieval architectures, ranking models, and search infrastructure.
• Partner with engineering teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and performant search services.
• Contribute to the development of self-service search platform capabilities used by internal product teams.
• Provide technical input to senior leadership on search, retrieval, and AI strategy.
• Mentor applied scientists and ML practitioners across the organization.

Skills

Python

Search systems design

Retrieval architectures

Mentoring

Production deployment

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face Transformers

Job description

Reuters is seeking an accomplished Lead Applied Scientist to own the design, development, and production deployment of large-scale search and information retrieval systems powering Westlaw, Practical Law, CoCounsel, and Thomson Reuters search experiences.

You will work across indexing, ranking, semantic retrieval, hybrid search, and retrieval optimization for complex legal, tax, and accounting content, collaborating with multiple product teams to deliver measurable impact.