Staff Software Engineer – Next-Gen Retrieval Platform

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

Job summary

Thomson Reuters seeks a Staff Software Engineer for the Search Retrieval Platform to democratize high-quality retrieval across products. You will design APIs, drive platform capabilities, and collaborate with product teams, research engineers, and internal clients to deliver scalable search solutions.

This role emphasizes ownership of ingestion, indexing, security, and observability, with a path to production-ready capabilities and continuous AI-assisted development.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering with progression to staff-level scope and cross-functional leadership.
• CS or related degree or equivalent experience.
• Experience building search/retrieval/data-intensive platforms at scale with distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience designing APIs and services used by multiple teams with contracts and versioning.
• Operational rigor: SLOs, observability, on-call ownership, and incident learning.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools.

Responsibilities

• Turn customer and product needs into platform capabilities with product teams, client teams, and agent builders.
• Design the retrieval APIs and search services for end users, AI agents, and internal systems, with tunable filtering and ranking.
• Make retrieval customizable by design: pluggable components for chunking, enrichment, embedding, ranking, and custom models.
• Own how content is ingested and indexed on the platform, so customization reaches the stack.
• Partner across disciplines with Research Engineering and Applied Science to translate new retrieval techniques into platform capability.
• Work with product and client teams to prioritize the roadmap and drive adoption.
• Build evaluation into the platform: offline evaluation, search grading, and online experiments.
• Own the security posture of retrieval: multi-tenant data isolation and entitlements.
• Own SLOs, observability, and on-call for what you build, driving improvements from incident reviews.

Skills

8+ years exp

Distributed systems

APIs design

Python/Java/Go

Cross-functional leadership

AI-assisted development

Education

CS or related degree

Tools

Vespa

OpenSearch

Elasticsearch

Job description

Thomson Reuters seeks a Staff Software Engineer for the Search Retrieval Platform to democratize high-quality retrieval across products. You will design APIs, drive platform capabilities, and collaborate with product teams, research engineers, and internal clients to deliver scalable search solutions.

This role emphasizes ownership of ingestion, indexing, security, and observability, with a path to production-ready capabilities and continuous AI-assisted development.