Staff Software Engineer: AI-Driven Search Control Plane

Thomson Reuters; Frisco (TX); Hybrid; USD 118,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Thomson Reuters is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to architect and operate a scalable control plane for its AI-enabled search platform. You will own provisioning of Kubernetes, Kafka, and data planes, while ensuring tenant isolation, RBAC, and secure, auditable workflows.

You will lead cross-team efforts, mentor engineers, and help drive AI-assisted development tools across the organization, delivering reliable search infrastructure at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with progression to staff-level scope.
• Experience designing, building, and operating production platform or infrastructure services at scale, with strong distributed systems fundamentals.
• Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred), including Kubernetes or another container orchestrator and infrastructure as code.
• Production experience operating a search engine such as Vespa, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch, including capacity planning and index lifecycle.
• Operational rigor: SLO definition, observability, on-call leadership, and learning from incidents.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own the control plane that creates, configures, upgrades, promotes, and retires search systems on demand, with full lifecycle management at the click of a button.
• Own automated provisioning of everything a search system needs: Kubernetes workloads, Kafka messaging, ingestion pipelines, and the data plane for query and ingest.
• Provide the lifecycle workflows for schema changes, reingest, index switch, and rollback, with status that tells callers when an index is ready.
• Build sovereignty into the platform: tenant data isolation, enterprise identity and role-based access, and the controls that keep each customer's data within the boundaries it requires.
• Design the configuration data model and persistence layer for system definitions, component registries, index lifecycle state, and audit history, built to scale across tenants and regions.
• Set the platform's interface standards, including versioned, backward-compatible contracts and clear documentation, and expose what evaluation and experimentation workflows need.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

AI-assisted development

Cross-team collaboration

Education

B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

Go

Java

Python

Kubernetes

AWS

OpenSearch

Vespa

Job description

Thomson Reuters is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to architect and operate a scalable control plane for its AI-enabled search platform. You will own provisioning of Kubernetes, Kafka, and data planes, while ensuring tenant isolation, RBAC, and secure, auditable workflows.

You will lead cross-team efforts, mentor engineers, and help drive AI-assisted development tools across the organization, delivering reliable search infrastructure at scale.