Senior Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Thomson Reuters; Ann Arbor (MI); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work options

Tuition reimbursement

Mental health and well‑being programs

Volunteer days

Job summary

Thomson Reuters is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist, Document Understanding to design, build, and deploy production‑grade document understanding systems powering Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel. You will work on semantic chunking, document enrichment, and knowledge graph construction for complex legal content.

You have a PhD or Master’s and 5+ years shipping document understanding or knowledge graph systems, with hands‑on experience in PyTorch, Transformers, and model deployment in

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s in CS/AI/NLP or related field with 5+ years post‑degree industry experience.
• Production experience shipping document understanding or knowledge graph systems.
• Publications at ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD or equivalent venue.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy semantic chunking models for lengthy, non‑uniformly structured legal documents with adjustable granularity across use cases.
• Build document enrichment systems that classify documents according to legal and customer‑defined taxonomies and extract rich metadata.
• Develop LLM‑based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link citations, entities, and legal concepts across diverse legal content.
• Build scalable synthetic data generation systems for model training, multi‑hop query simulation, and hallucination‑free answer generation.
• Apply knowledge distillation techniques to compress large models into latency‑constrained, production‑ready SLMs.
• Design evaluation frameworks—component‑level and end‑to‑end—using expert annotation and synthetic data.
• Drive independent technical decisions on chunking strategy, classification approach, knowledge extraction methods, and multi‑document reasoning architecture.
• Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines.
• Contribute to published research at venues such as ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, and KDD, and to intellectual property.

Skills

Production Python

PyTorch

Hugging Face Transformers

DeepSpeed

Leading through influence

Education

PhD or Master’s in CS/AI/NLP

Tools

AzureML

AWS SageMaker

Knowledge graph frameworks

Job description

New Position: This position is open due to an existing vacancy to support our evolving business needs.

Senior Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

About the Role

This applied science position focuses on designing, building, and deploying production‑grade document understanding systems that power Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel. You will work across semantic chunking, document enrichment, and knowledge graph construction for complex legal, tax, and accounting content, delivering foundational intelligence that multiple product teams depend on at scale.

About You

You hold a PhD or Master’s in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field, and have 5+ years of post‑degree industry experience shipping document understanding, information extraction, or knowledge graph systems into production. You possess hands‑on depth across model development, distillation, evaluation, and deployment, and work independently while leading through influence in an applied research setting.

What You’ll Do

• Design and deploy semantic chunking models for lengthy, non‑uniformly structured legal documents with adjustable granularity across use cases.
• Build document enrichment systems that classify documents according to legal and customer‑defined taxonomies and extract rich metadata.
• Develop LLM‑based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link citations, entities, and legal concepts across diverse legal content.
• Build scalable synthetic data generation systems for model training, multi‑hop query simulation, and hallucination‑free answer generation.
• Apply knowledge distillation techniques to compress large models into latency‑constrained, production‑ready SLMs.
• Design evaluation frameworks—component‑level and end‑to‑end—using expert annotation and synthetic data.
• Drive independent technical decisions on chunking strategy, classification approach, knowledge extraction methods, and multi‑document reasoning architecture.
• Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines.
• Contribute to published research at venues such as ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, and KDD, and to intellectual property.

Required Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field.
• 5+ years of post‑degree industry experience shipping document understanding, information extraction, or knowledge graph systems into production—not research‑only experience.
• Publications at ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD, or an equivalent venue.
• Experience leading through influence in an applied research setting.
• Production Python experience and familiarity with PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and DeepSpeed.

Hands‑on production depth required in:

• Document layout analysis and semantic chunking beyond fixed‑size or paragraph‑based methods.
• Hierarchical, multi‑label document classification with domain‑specific and customer‑defined schemas.
• Entity recognition and linking, relation extraction, citation parsing, and knowledge graph construction from unstructured text.
• LLM‑based information extraction, few‑shot and multi‑task learning, and post‑training.
• Knowledge distillation, model compression, and SLM deployment under latency constraints.
• Synthetic data generation for NLP: query‑answer generation with verification and scalable data augmentation.
• Annotation workflow design and evaluation framework development for document understanding tasks.

Preferred Qualifications

• Legal document understanding, legal information extraction, or legal AI applications.
• Experience with complex document structures common in legal content—nested hierarchies, cross‑references, non‑uniform formatting, and embedded elements.
• Retrieval, QA, or analysis systems over large document collections.
• Knowledge graph frameworks for legal or enterprise applications.
• RAG and agentic workflows for enterprise knowledge systems.
• AzureML or AWS SageMaker expertise.

What’s in it For You?

• 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 Your 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.

We are 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. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, 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.