Staff Software Engineer, AI-Driven Search Control Plane

Thomson Reuters Foundation; New York (NY); Remote; USD 118,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Competitive benefits

Tuition reimbursement

Job summary

Thomson Reuters Foundation is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the AI Enabled Software Engineering team. You will design and own a scalable control plane that provisions Kubernetes, Kafka, ingestion pipelines, and data plane components for search systems with strong security and observability.

You will lead cross-functional initiatives, mentor engineers, and drive production-grade infrastructure across Vespa/OpenSearch deployments, while shaping platform APIs and developer experience

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with progression to staff-level scope.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Experience designing, building, and operating production platform or infrastructure services at scale.
• Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred), including Kubernetes and IaC.
• Production experience operating a search engine such as Vespa, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch.
• Operational rigor: SLO definition, observability, on-call leadership, and learning from incidents.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own the control plane that creates, configures, upgrades, promotes, and retires search systems with full lifecycle management.
• Own automated provisioning of Kubernetes workloads, Kafka, ingestion pipelines, and data plane for query and ingest.
• Provide lifecycle workflows for schema changes, reingest, index switch, and rollback with status updates.
• Build sovereignty into the platform with tenant data isolation and RBAC controls.
• Set platform interface standards and expose evaluation/experiment workflows.
• Own the infrastructure behind every search index (Vespa and OpenSearch) including capacity planning and on-call path.

Skills

Go

Java

Python

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

OpenSearch

Vespa

Kafka

Job description

Thomson Reuters Foundation is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the AI Enabled Software Engineering team. You will design and own a scalable control plane that provisions Kubernetes, Kafka, ingestion pipelines, and data plane components for search systems with strong security and observability.

You will lead cross-functional initiatives, mentor engineers, and drive production-grade infrastructure across Vespa/OpenSearch deployments, while shaping platform APIs and developer experience