Staff AI Platform Engineer - Backend & Orchestration

Thomson Reuters; Ann Arbor (MI); Hybrid; USD 127,000 - 237,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid Work Model

Comprehensive benefits

Tuition reimbursement

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Thomson Reuters is seeking a Lead Software Engineer (Staff Engineer) to own the backend and AI orchestration for CoCounsel for Audit, turning frontier models into reliable production workflows at scale.

You will shape platform patterns, drive multi‑quarter initiatives across AI, product, and infra, mentor engineers, and build scalable systems handling millions of documents, ensuring correctness, observability, and security.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 5-7+ years of experience in full‑stack development, building scalable cloud‑based applications, web services, APIs and AI‑driven products.
• Deep Python expertise and experience with production systems using frameworks like FastAPI (or similar), relational databases (PostgreSQL or equivalent), and a major cloud provider (AWS preferred).
• Strong background in distributed systems: data modeling, API contracts, observability, resilience patterns, and performance tuning under load.
• Proven track record leading large, complex projects end‑to‑end: architecture, execution, rollout, and long‑term operation.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with product, design, and ML teams in a fast‑moving environment.
• Demonstrated interest in AI systems and new engineering paradigms: LLMs, agents, retrieval, or similar – you care about what “AI‑native” software should look like.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi‑quarter initiatives that cut across AI, product, and infra (e.g., a new orchestration layer, a low‑latency retrieval system, or a unified knowledge base).
• Mentor senior and mid‑level engineers, raising the bar on system design, code quality, and AI integration practices across the org.
• Be a go‑to expert in new model capabilities, collaborating closely with AI/ML engineers, researchers, designers, and PMs to translate industry improvements into reliable, user‑facing workflows that accountants trust.
• Help shape the team’s roadmap, technical strategy, and engineering culture – from experimentation practices to testing, rollout, and post‑mortems.
• Provide your technical POV on architecting and implementing backend services (Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, Vercel) that power generative AI agents, complex workflows, and document‑centric experiences.
• Build and evolve AI orchestration: routing, tool calling, MCP servers, multi‑step workflows, safety and guardrails, and robust error handling around third‑party LLMs.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

Communication

AI systems

LLMs

Retrieval

Orchestration

Backend design

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience

Tools

Python

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

AWS

Job description

Thomson Reuters is seeking a Lead Software Engineer (Staff Engineer) to own the backend and AI orchestration for CoCounsel for Audit, turning frontier models into reliable production workflows at scale.

You will shape platform patterns, drive multi‑quarter initiatives across AI, product, and infra, mentor engineers, and build scalable systems handling millions of documents, ensuring correctness, observability, and security.