Manager, Software Engineering — Customer Files Orchestration

Software Engineering Manager

CoCounsel Legal is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead the team that owns the Customer Files Orchestration Service – the system that makes a customer’s documents usable by CoCounsel Legal’s agents.

Every file a customer brings to CoCounsel passes through this team: upload, storage, extraction, embedding, and indexing, orchestrated end-to-end. You make millions of customer files available to CoCounsel. Bringing a customer’s content together with Thomson Reuters’ world-class proprietary content and the latest frontier models – including TR’s own custom large language models – is what makes our products highly differentiated and our agent experiences genuinely grounded.

This team is a critical part of what makes that combination possible.

It is also, unavoidably, a hard distributed systems problem. Supporting millions of files means real engineering: dedicated workers, fair queuing so one busy customer cannot starve another, durable state, idempotent processing, and honest reasoning about consistency and delivery guarantees across systems.

The team owns what it builds, designing, implementing, testing, deploying, scaling, and operating the service end-to-end. This role will help take a recently formed, cross-functional group and shape it into a durable, high-performing engineering team with clear ownership, a stable operational posture, and the credibility to lead decisions about design, roadmaps, and opportunity costs within the team and across stakeholders.

In this position, you will:

• Own customer file orchestration service end-to-end – Upload, storage, content extraction, embedding, indexing, and observability and monitoring – balancing new capability delivery against reliability.
• Drive API-first execution – The file and workspace APIs this team owns serve a growing set of consumers beyond orchestration, and this team treats them as a product – clear ownership, versioned contracts, documented behavior, deliberate change management, and independent deployability – not an incidental collection of backend endpoints
• Lead the team’s judgment on the problems that define the domain – Consistency models (where eventual consistency is acceptable and where a strongly-consistent read is the only correct answer), delivery guarantees (at-least-once with idempotent processors versus the cost of true exactly-once), lease and heartbeat models for crash recovery, and state transitions across asynchronous service boundaries
• Own the queuing and flow-control architecture – Fair queuing, rate limiting, back pressure, circuit breaking, dead-letter handling, and autoscaling.
• Champion full operational ownership – The team designs, builds, tests, deploys, scales, and operates what it ships – with on-call, incident response, SLOs, and testing treated as first-class engineering work, not afterthoughts.
• Partner with platforms and client applications teams to deliver a world-class product – Leverage robust orchestration across other (internal and external) services to enable both human users and agents with world-class experiences.

Team Management

• Build and lead the Files Orchestration engineering team – Hiring, onboarding, performance, and career development – turning a recently-formed cross-functional group into a stable team with clear, durable ownership
• Develop engineers who combine distributed systems depth with real operational responsibility – Lead an engineering team who owns their work from the first line of code to the production dashboard, and who own testing/QA, deployments, and support rather than handing them off.
• Translate complex orchestration and scale trade-offs to product managers and business leaders – Making the meaning of a throughput number and the risk in a deadline legible to non-engineers.
• Establish operating rhythms and ways of working – Establish principled ways of working, empowering the team to own their operating rhythms: roadmap, stand-ups, demos, retros, support rotations, and beyond.
• Strong technical leadership via effective negotiation and influence – Earn the trust of leaders and external teams, negotiating capacity and roadmaps to converge on technical…