Lead AI Forward Engineer

Overview

The Lead AI Forward Engineer designs and guides the delivery of AI-powered solutions that reduce operational toil and accelerate technology teams across the CIO organization. This role operates as a forward‑deployed solution architect and engineer, partnering closely with teams to identify opportunities, design end‑to‑end architectures, and drive implementations to production.

• Identify high‑impact opportunities to apply AI automation and intelligent agents across CIO technology teams.
• Design end‑to‑end AI solutions, including workflows, integration patterns, data flows, and operational considerations.
• Guide implementation from prototype to production, ensuring solutions meet reliability, security, and compliance expectations.
• Define reusable architectural patterns and reference designs to enable broader adoption across teams.
• Build scalable pipelines to collect and analyze inference‑ and workflow‑level telemetry; develop dashboards and reports.
• Ensure compliance with AI standards for monitoring, governance, privacy, and auditability.
• Evaluate and recommend AI/ML technologies and platforms (LLM orchestration, agentic frameworks, cloud AI services).
• Design flexible architectures that can evolve with model/provider changes and emerging AI capabilities.
• Establish and track SLOs/SLIs for critical AI services.
• Integrate AI observability tooling into CI/CD; develop automated guardrails and policy enforcement.
• Partner with engineering teams, service owners, and stakeholders to translate business needs into technical requirements.
• Communicate trade‑offs and design decisions to technical and non‑technical audiences, including senior leadership.
• Mentor engineers and share patterns, practices, and lessons learned.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and AI teams to design evaluation frameworks and run tests, benchmarks, canaries, and A/B experiments.
• Onboard new AI use cases into the observability platform; support scaling and monitoring during major releases.

• 6+ years of experience in solution architecture, technical strategy, or senior engineering roles.
• Experience building software prototypes and taking solutions to production in ambiguous environments.
• Familiarity with LLM frameworks and patterns (e.g., Lang Chain, Llama Index), RAG/vector search concepts, and enterprise integration.
• Experience with Dev Ops/Platform Engineering/SRE principles and designing for operational excellence.
• Exposure to enterprise service management (e.g., Service Now/ITSM), security architecture, and compliance‑oriented environments.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through mentoring, architectural governance, or cross‑team enablement.

• Proficiency in Python (strongly preferred) and ability to prototype and validate designs.
• Cloud architecture familiarity in AWS, Azure, or GCP, including common service patterns and enterprise constraints.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, CI/CD, and cloud‑native architectures.
• Understanding of AI/ML and LLM application patterns, including prompt design and orchestration approaches.
• Experience designing for latency, cost, quality, safety, and reliability trade‑offs.

• Hybrid work model with flexible office days.
• Flexibility and work‑life balance policies, including work‑from‑anywhere up to 8 weeks per year.
• Career development and growth programs.
• Competitive benefits (vacation, mental health days, Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, etc.).
• Commitment to inclusion, belonging, and social impact initiatives.

Base compensation range: $118,400

USD – $219,800

USD (US locations). For Ontario, Canada: $140,600

CAD – $190,600

CAD. The range depends on knowledge, skills, and experience.

Thomson Reuters is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. We strive to provide a drug‑free workplace and reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. All employment decisions will be made in accordance with applicable laws.