Staff Software Engineer, Search Control Plane

Thomson Reuters; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Thomson Reuters is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the AI Enabled Software Engineering (AIESE) team to build a scalable control plane for the search platform. You will design and own provisioning of Kubernetes, Kafka, ingestion pipelines, and data plane for query and ingest with sovereignty and observability built in from the start.

You will define lifecycle workflows, implement secure, scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, and drive platform reliability and performance while mentoring

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering with progression to staff-level scope and cross-functional leadership
• Experience designing, building, and operating production platform or infrastructure services at scale
• Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred) including Kubernetes and infrastructure as code
• Production experience operating a search engine such as Vespa, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch
• Operational rigor: SLO definition, observability, on-call leadership

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 the data plane for query and ingest
• Provide lifecycle workflows for schema changes, reingest, index switch, and rollback with ready status
• Build sovereignty into the platform: tenant data isolation, enterprise identity and RBAC
• Design the configuration data model and persistence layer for system definitions, registries, index lifecycle state, and audit history
• Set platform interface standards and documentation; expose evaluation and experimentation workflows

Skills

Go

Java

Python

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

SRE practices

Education

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

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

Terraform

OpenSearch

Vespa

Elasticsearch

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Search Control Plane

Our vision

We are building the next-generation search platform, with a vision to democratize knowledge construction and consumption at Thomson Reuters. The platform consolidates search systems across Thomson Reuters products and services, serving millions of end users, internal agents, and internal search teams, into a fully managed, customizable, sovereign, and self-serve search platform.

Job Description:

The AI Enabled Software Engineering (AIESE) team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for a highly impactful role at the foundation of the search platform. You will design and deliver a fully managed, highly scalable, and reliable control plane that brings a search system to life and manages its full lifecycle at the click of a button. That means automating the provisioning of Kubernetes, Kafka, ingestion pipelines, and the data plane for query and ingest, with sovereignty and observability built in from the start, and owning the infrastructure that runs every search index. Every search system that moves onto the platform depends on what you build, so your work sets how quickly and safely teams across Thomson Reuters can create, change, and operate search on their own. Staff Engineers here define, build, deploy, and operate what they ship. We ship to production constantly, treat delivery friction as a standing engineering priority, and use AI-assisted development as the norm.

Key Responsibilities:

Control plane and lifecycle

• 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.

Search index infrastructure and reliability

• Own the infrastructure behind every search index (Vespa and OpenSearch): provisioning, capacity planning, health, backup and restore, and the on-call path.
• Set capacity budgets and limits for reindexing and backfills, in partnership with the retrieval owner who decides when and how they run.
• Make observability a first-class capability and own platform SLOs for availability, query latency, ingestion throughput, and document freshness, with tracing and alerting across provisioning, ingestion, and the data plane, including agentic retrieval paths.
• Own the platform's cloud infrastructure as code across environments and the CI/CD pipeline, and drive down delivery friction so the team can ship safely and often.
• Build security in from the start: least-privilege access, secrets management, encryption at rest and in transit (including customer-managed keys), audit logging, and compliance.
• Own cost and performance planning as tenants, content, and query traffic grow.
• Operate what you build: on-call, incident response, and post-mortems that lead to systemic fixes.

Technical leadership

• Set architectural principles and design patterns for the control plane and infrastructure, and act as the technical authority other teams turn to.
• Lead cross-team projects, set priorities, and advise leadership on complex infrastructure and security decisions.
• Partner with client teams to understand their experience adopting the platform, and feed what you learn into the roadmap.
• Mentor Senior and mid-level engineers, and help the team use AI-assisted development effectively.

Required qualifications:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with progression to staff-level scope, including ownership of a functional area and leadership of cross-functional projects. 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, with strong distributed systems fundamentals, in a language such as Go, Java, Python, or an equivalent
• 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