Principal Engineer

Thomson Reuters is hiring a Principal Engineer for HighQ, our enterprise collaboration platform for the legal industry, used by leading law firms worldwide to deliver digital services to their clients.

This is a senior individual contributor role. The Principal Engineer sets technical direction across HighQ's most significant engineering work, owns outcomes from design through production, and is directly accountable for raising the engineering bar across the organisation. The role partners closely with directors, architects, and Staff engineers, and operates as a senior technical voice in decisions that span multiple teams.

About the role:

Evaluate and introduce new technologies and engineering practices that improve how the organisation builds and delivers software.

Architect and design complex systems that are scalable, performant, and maintainable.

Take technical ideas from concept to production, aligned with business priorities and technical strategy.

Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams, raising the standard of work across the organisation.

Contribute as a hands-on engineer. Write production code and review the work of others to hold the technical bar.

Work with product, architecture, and engineering peers to turn business requirements into sound technical designs.

Lead the engineering work behind HighQ's integration with modern AI and agent platforms, including the technical surfaces through which HighQ provides context and capability to AI systems.

Drive reliability, scalability, and performance improvements on a platform serving demanding enterprise customers with significant data and workflow commitments.

About you:

Track record of designing, building, and delivering complex software systems in production.

Operates effectively as a senior individual contributor, drives results independently, and is accountable for outcomes.

Proficiency in Java and Python coupled with broad fluency across modern backend ecosystems including containerised services, relational databases, and distributed systems patterns.

Deep command of software engineering fundamentals and how they apply in practice.

Demonstrated ability to set architectural direction across multiple teams and be accountable for the outcome.

Experience driving reliability, scaling, or performance work in production systems.

Familiarity with AI/LLM integration patterns, including the engineering practices that make AI features dependable in production (evals, monitoring, context management).Generates and advances technical ideas that produce meaningful business outcomes.

Strong communicator. Articulates complex technical ideas clearly to engineering and non-engineering audiences alike.#LI-LT1

What’s in it For You?

Hybrid Work Model:
We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role) for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connected.

Flexibility & Work-Life Balance:
Flex My Way is a set of supportive workplace policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities, whether caring for family, giving back to the community, or finding time to refresh and reset. This builds upon our flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, empowering employees to achieve a better work-life balance.

Career Development and Growth:
By fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development, we prepare our talent to tackle tomorrow’s challenges and deliver real-world solutions. Our Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.

Industry Competitive Benefits:
We offer comprehensive benefit plans to include flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, access to the Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, employee incentive programs, and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.

Culture:
Globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more. We live by our values:
Obsess…