Senior Manager, Software Engineering -Search Platform

Overview of the Role

The Senior Manager, Software Engineering – Search Platform will lead the engineering team that builds, operates, and evolves the shared search platform  platform powers the company’s search capability across legal, tax, and professional products, providing a managed, self‑service infrastructure that allows internal client teams to configure, deploy, and iterate on production search systems in days rather than months.

• Platform & Technical Leadership – Own the end‑to‑end platform engineering roadmap, spanning document ingestion, search engine management, query APIs, control‑plane APIs, and the cloud infrastructure that ties them together; balance new capability delivery with reliability and technical debt management.
• Drive API‑first, self‑service architectural thinking – every capability must be accessible via a clean, versioned, well‑documented API to enable internal teams to configure and operate search systems without direct platform support.
• Lead migration from current infrastructure to the platform’s strategic search engine (Vespa), maintaining zero‑downtime production operations during transition.
• Champion full‑stack operational ownership – establish on‑call rotations, incident response practices, SLO definitions, and reliability engineering as core team responsibilities.
• Build a team culture that embraces AI‑assisted development, identifies and eliminates delivery friction, and relentlessly pushes for constant production shipping.
• Collaborate with TR Labs to integrate new retrieval techniques, embedding models, re‑ranking approaches, and agentic search patterns into the platform, ensuring proper latency SLOs, versioning, and rollback capability.
• Oversee platform infrastructure, including event streaming (Kafka/MSK), AWS cloud services, observability tooling, and security controls such as multi‑tenant data isolation and customer‑controlled encryption.

• Team Management – Build and lead a team of ~10 engineers (Staff and Senior levels), managing hiring, onboarding, performance, and professional development with a focus on deep technical ownership.
• Develop engineers with a strong sense of distributed systems, search domain expertise, and operational responsibility; foster empowered ownership.
• Translate complex platform concepts to non‑technical stakeholders; balance platform responsibilities with direct search solution delivery for CoCounsel’s highest‑priority use cases.
• Define and maintain engineering processes that ensure rigorous testing, code review, reliability standards, and continuous evaluation of search quality.

• Strategic Delivery – Establish platform health and developer‑experience benchmarks (API reliability SLOs, onboarding time‑to‑value, search quality metrics) and drive continuous improvement.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies with a clear assessment of production‑readiness and operational implications.
• Collaborate closely with product management, TR Labs, and consuming engineering teams to align the roadmap with business priorities across CoCounsel, Westlaw, and the broader TR product portfolio.

Ideal candidates possess deep experience leading large‑scale distributed data systems and building shared infrastructure for multiple teams. They have a track record of building high‑velocity engineering teams, managing full‑stack reliability, and embedding AI‑assisted development practices.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in a technical leadership or engineering management role.
• Proven experience designing and operating large‑scale distributed data systems (event streaming, data pipelines, search/indexing infrastructure).
• Track record of building shared infrastructure consumed by multiple teams with a product mindset toward developer experience.
• Experience leading teams with end‑to‑end production ownership – on‑call, SLO management, incident response.
• Advanced knowledge of distributed systems design, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), API design, software architecture, and observability.
• Proficiency in Python and strong…