Lead Applied Scientist

About the Role Are you ready to work at the forefront of applied AI research, where your work reaches real customers instead of staying in a lab notebook?

Thomson Reuters Labs (TR Labs) is the AI Research & Development arm of Thomson Reuters. We experiment, we build, we deliver.

Our mission is to create industry-leading AI solutions for Legal and Tax & Accounting professionals. These people make decisions that affect businesses, courts, markets, and lives. We systematically explore emerging AI/ML technologies, and we stay focused on real customer problems and opportunities.

The Lead Applied Scientist is a senior, high-influence scientific leader within TR Labs. In this role, you will set the research strategy and lead the initiatives that shape Thomson Reuters' AI/ML roadmap across multiple product features.

You will drive innovation in specialized domains such as legal reasoning, document understanding, and knowledge graphs. You will establish the best practices and technical vision that other teams build on. You will also serve as a thought leader, both inside Thomson Reuters and in the wider AI community, mentoring scientists across Labs and leading engagement with key stakeholders.

This is a role for someone who wants their ideas to ship. You will work with product, engineering, and business leaders to turn new methods into capabilities that customers use every day.

What You'll DoDefine the research strategy for your focus areas and align it with Thomson Reuters' AI/ML roadmap across multiple product features.

Lead high-impact initiatives from early experimentation through to production-ready AI capabilities.

Drive innovation in specialized domains such as legal reasoning, document understanding, and knowledge graphs.

Design, evaluate, and advance RAG architectures, agentic frameworks, and tool-using systems for complex professional use cases.

Establish best practices, evaluation methodologies, and technical standards that raise the quality bar across Labs.

Develop a deep understanding of customer problems and the data that informs them, and translate that understanding into the right AI solutions.

Show how novel methods can influence product roadmaps and business outcomes.

Lead stakeholder engagement across product, engineering, and business teams.

Mentor and grow scientists across Labs, building scientific depth and leadership capability.

Provide thought leadership through internal forums, external publications, conferences, and industry communities.

Deliver production-quality code with well-managed software and MLOps practices.

About You You are a scientist who gets energy from turning hard, ambiguous problems into working solutions. You are comfortable moving between research and execution.

You can read a new paper in the morning, prototype an idea in the afternoon, and explain its business impact to a product leader the next day.

You combine deep technical expertise in modern AI with a strong product mindset. You are curious about the professional domains you work in, whether that is law, tax, medicine, or risk, and you want to understand customers' problems well enough to solve them properly.

You lead by influence. You build trust through scientific rigor, clear communication, and a genuine commitment to helping the people around you grow. You can explain complex ideas clearly to scientists, engineers, executives, and customers.

Qualifications

PhD or Master's degree with equivalent industry experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
7+ years of hands-on experience building production IR, NLP, ML, or GenAI systems using modern techniques.

Demonstrated experience leading through others in cross-functional teams to deliver end-to-end AI capabilities.

Strong product mindset, with the ability to translate complex customer problems into successful AI applications.

Proven ability to demonstrate novel methods that influence product roadmaps and business outcomes.

Outstanding communication and analytical skills.

Deep expertise in RAG architectures, agentic frameworks, tool-using systems, and evaluation methodologies.

Significant experience developing novel methods for complex professional domains such as medical, tax, or law.

Publications at top-tier venues (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD).Experience delivering production code with well-managed software/MLOps practices.#LI-LP2

This posting is for proactive recruitment purposes and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies within our…