Senior Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval

Senior Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval Senior Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval About the Role

This is an applied science position focused on building and deploying production-grade search systems that power Westlaw, Practical Law, and CoCounsel. You will work across neural information retrieval, semantic and hybrid search, re-ranking, and query understanding — delivering search quality and relevance at scale for legal and professional content.

You hold a PhD or Master's in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field, with 5+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping search or retrieval systems into production. You have hands-on depth in neural IR and deep learning for NLP, you work independently, and you measure success by what performs in production.

Design, build, and deploy end-to-end neural search systems including dense retrieval, hybrid search, semantic chunking, embedding models, cross-encoders, SLM re-rankers, and transformer-based approaches

Develop models for query understanding, document re-ranking, and retrieval quality optimization

Build evaluation frameworks — component-level and end-to-end — using expert annotation and synthetic data generation

Drive independent technical decisions on retrieval architecture, indexing strategy, ranking models, and evaluation methodology

Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines

Contribute to published research at venues such as SIGIR, ECIR, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, and ICLR, and to intellectual property

5+ years of post-degree industry experience shipping search, retrieval, or RAG systems into production — not research-only experience

Production Python and experience with PyTorch, Deep Speed, Torchtune, or Llama Factory

Search and RAG system design: vector databases, retrieval strategies, document chunking, metadata filtering, re-ranking, context optimisation, and orchestration

Post-training of large language models and their application to retrieval systems

Search, QA, or RAG over large corpora and long documents, including legal or enterprise search

Multi-stage or agentic retrieval architectures and query understanding for complex information needs

Legal domain applications: case law retrieval, precedent finding, document review

This posting is for proactive recruitment purposes and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies within our organization.

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 over our Customers, Compete to Win, Challenge (Y) our Thinking, Act Fast / Learn Fast, and Stronger Together.

Social Impact:
Make an impact in your…