Manager, Software Development Engineering

Overview of the Role

CoCounsel Legal Integrations is seeking a Manager, Software Engineering to lead the engineering team responsible for building, operating, and evolving Thomson Reuters’ Content Tools platform. Content Tools are the purpose‑built APIs and capabilities that give AI agents precise, reliable access to TR’s most valuable legal content – including case law, statutes, regulations, citations, and Practical Law materials. These tools are mission‑critical infrastructure: the bridge between TR’s authoritative content assets and the AI‑powered products – such as CoCounsel Legal – that depend on them.

The Manager owns the full engineering lifecycle for Content Tools: design, implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing operations. Equally important, this leader will navigate a distributed development model in which tools are built and contributed by multiple teams across the organization. The Manager is responsible for establishing governance, design standards, and contribution workflows that keep the ecosystem coherent as it grows – while serving as the primary engineering accountability point for tool quality, reliability, and developer experience.

This is a people leadership role managing a team of approximately 10 engineers. The successful candidate brings strong platform thinking, a collaborative leadership style, and deep credibility in building API‑first systems – ideally in domains where information quality and retrieval precision carry high stakes.

• Own the end‑to‑end engineering roadmap for Content Tools – spanning tool design and implementation, CLI and SDK exposure, CI/CD pipelines, evaluation infrastructure, and cloud operations – balancing new capability delivery with rigorous quality and reliability standards.
• Drive an API‑first, contract‑driven approach to tool development: every tool ships with a versioned CLI contract, schema, and clear ownership metadata that makes it discoverable and usable by consuming teams without direct engineering involvement.
• Establish and enforce the patterns, templates, and contribution standards that allow distributed teams to build and contribute tools consistently – including review workflows, quality gates, namespace governance, and guidance on when to create new tools versus extend existing ones.
• Lead the build‑out of the information retrieval (IR) evaluation framework, ensuring every tool is validated against representative datasets before release and that performance regressions are caught automatically in CI/CD.
• Champion full‑stack operational ownership: the team defines, builds, tests, deploys, and operates what it ships – including on‑call rotations, SLO definitions, incident response, and health monitoring for production tool services.
• Partner closely with TR Labs and CoCounsel Engineering teams to ensure content tools meet the interface requirements of agentic workflows – covering tool invocation patterns, result provenance.
• Oversee platform infrastructure, including cloud services (AWS), observability tooling, rate limiting, caching strategies, and multi‑tenant access controls that protect licensed content.

• Serve as the engineering accountability point for the Content Tools ecosystem as a whole – not just the tools your team builds directly, but the standards and guardrails that govern contributions from partner teams across the organization.
• Define and maintain contribution workflows, architectural review criteria, and consistency checks that prevent capability duplication and ensure interoperability across a growing tool catalog.
• Manage tool lifecycle policies, including deprecation, migration support, versioning strategies, and breaking‑change processes – communicating proactively with consuming teams to minimize disruption.
• Build and maintain a centralized tool registry with machine‑readable descriptions, usage guidance, and performance characteristics – making the tool ecosystem discoverable and self‑service for agent developers.
• Establish shared development infrastructure – common libraries, boilerplate generators, mock services, and local development environments – that makes it…