Lead Software Engineer AI; Staff Engineer

Position: Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer)
## Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer)
Apply remote type:
Hybrid locations:
United States of America, Eagan, Minnesota:
United States of America, Frisco, Texas:
Canada, Toronto, Ontario:
United States of America, Ann Arbor, Michigan time type:
Full time posted on:
Posted Todaytime left to apply:
End Date:
October 26, 2026 (30+ days left to apply) job requisition :
JREQ
201665
** Thomson Reuters
** products power the professionals who are shaping the world.  Our platforms drive legal, tax, accounting and audit products, including Cloud Audit Suite—a connected set of products spanning Engagement Manager and Guided Assurance. As a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer AI), you will own core backend and AI orchestration systems that turn frontier models into reliable, production‐grade workflows  will also help drive our shift to an engineering-led, AI-native organization, one where AI writes much of the code and engineers stay in the loop to provide judgment, architecture, and direction where it matters most.

About the role:

You will be a Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer) responsible for the architecture and system design of Audit Suite.
* Shape the team's AI and patterns:
Define patterns for building MCP servers, designing agents, novel uses of LLMs, experimentation, and scalable infrastructure. Your decisions will influence your product area and adjacent teams, not just a single feature.
* Work at real production scale:
Build and evolve systems that operate over millions of documents, highly structured tax data, ever-changing laws, and thousands of concurrent AI interactions from accountants doing time‐sensitive work.
* Small teams, big surface area:
Interact and lead across several teams of engineers, product, UX design and AI Labs partners to research, design and ship products quickly, with direct access to product leadership and customers.
* Great fit for people who enjoy and thrive at setting technical direction, mentoring senior engineers, and spending most of their time in the code and architecture of AI systems.
* Shape the platform integration strategy across new and existing Thomson Reuters audit systems to provide world-class content and solutions for our customers.

What you'll do:

Technical leadership and cross‐functional influence
* Lead multi‐quarter initiatives that cut across AI, product, and infra (e.g., a new orchestration layer, a low-latency retrieval system, or a unified knowledge base).
* Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raising the bar on system design, code quality, and AI integration practices across the org.
* Be a go-to expert in new model capabilities, collaborating closely with AI/ML engineers, researchers, designers, and PMs to translate industry improvements into reliable, user‐facing workflows that accountants trust.
* Help shape the team’s roadmap, technical strategy, and engineering culture – from experimentation practices to testing, rollout, and postmortems.

Design and own AI‐first backend systems
* Own the end-to-end architecture and design of backend services (C#/.NET, Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, Vercel) that integrate and orchestrate across heterogeneous systems and technology stacks, powering generative AI agents, complex workflows and document‐centric experiences.
* Build and evolve AI orchestration: routing, tool calling, MCP servers, multi‐step workflows, safety and guardrails, and robust error handling around third‐party LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others).Scale, reliability, and performance
* Design for high‐throughput, low‐latency AI workloads: caching, queuing, rate‐limiting, model failover, and cost/performance trade-offs.
* Work with large‐scale data: millions of documents, retrieval and search, vector stores, and indexing strategies tailored to tax and accounting use cases.
* Establish and refine SLOs, observability, and incident response for AI systems that must be correct, auditable, and trustworthy in professional workflows.

About You:

You are a fit for the position of Lead Software Engineer AI (Staff Engineer) if your background includes:

Required Experience &

Skills:

* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, a related field,…