Manager, Applied Research – Legal Tech

Are you excited about working at the forefront of applied research in an industry setting? Thomson Reuters Labs in Canada is seeking scientists with a passion for solving problems using state-of-the-art information retrieval, natural language processing and generative AI.

What does Thomson Reuters Labs do? We experiment, we build, we deliver. We support the organization and our customers through applied research in natural language processing and informational retrieval. We innovate collaboratively with product and domain experts to identify compelling solutions at the intersection of user needs and technical feasibility. Our team in Labs Legal Tech is designing the next generation of Legal Technology globally. We drive AI innovation for Thomson Reuters’ LegalTech Products and features, including CoCounsel Core, CoCounsel Drafting, Practical Law, HighQ, Legal Tracker, Document Intelligence, Contract Express, Due Diligence, and others.

About the Role:

As a Manager, Applied Research in Labs, you will be part of a global cross-functional team of experts. We hire specialists across a variety of AI research areas, as well as Engineering and Design, to drive the company’s digital transformation. TR Labs is known for consistently delivering AI products that and serve Thomson Reuters customers in new and exciting ways. This opportunity combines hands-on project work as well as project and people leadership.

As a Manager of Applied Scientist, you will:

· Lead a high performing team of applied researchers throughout the full research and product development life cycle from ideation and PoC through to production scaling and feedback driven iteration

· Contribute to hands-on delivery on important projects

· Develop in-depth knowledge of customer problems, workflows and data. Identify state of the art technology relevant to TR products and leverage them to create value for TR customers

· Translate complex business problems into projects with clearly defined scope and objectives, and be accountable for timely, well-managed deliverables

· Provide input and insights to the business and Labs leadership on long-term AI strategy

· Share information, value diverse ideas, and partner effectively with colleagues in a cross-functional team

· Build close relationships with internal project stakeholders and provide AI subject matter expertise

· Mentor and coach scientists and engineers on best practices and fostering a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and collaboration

· Maintain scientific and technical expertise in one or more relevant areas as demonstrated through product deliverables, published research, and creating intellectual property

· Be a proactive communicator who is excited to share your work. You will be articulate and compelling in describing ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences. You will help lead the way in the adoption of AI across the enterprise.

About You:

You’re a fit for the role of Manager of Applied Scientist if your background includes:

· PhD in a relevant discipline or master’s plus a comparable level of experience

· 5+ years of hands-on experience building NLP / IR systems for commercial applications

· Demonstrable ability to mentor and coach colleagues as well as at least 2 years of line management experience

· Solid software engineering skills for prototyping and ensuring well-managed software delivery

· Demonstrable ability to connect cutting edge research to customer needs and creating well-structured research/project plans into working applications

· Experience as a technical leader, scoping, prioritizing, coordinating and guiding the work of others

· Experience collaborating with Product, Engineering and other business stakeholders in an agile manner to demonstrate value and iterate with customer feedback

Technical Qualifications:

· Solid understanding of classic ML techniques used for NLP problems

· Solid understanding of DL approaches used for NLP tasks such as transformer-based models

· Working understanding of inner workings of large language models

· Experience working on text heavy NLP projects

· Practical experience using generative AI technologies (prompt engineering, in-context learning, chain-of-thoughts, prompt optimization, auto-evaluation, function calling, controlled generation, etc.)

· Practical experience using RAG frameworks, pre-training/fine-tuning language models, and data curation/generation for training/fine-tuning language models,

· Practical experience using agentic frameworks for building applications (LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, etc.)

· Proficiency in Python, Git, AWS, Azure for remote model development and deployment

· Experience building lightweight UIs, iterating on greenfield concepts, applying agile development practices and rapid prototyping

Preferred Qualifications:

· Prior work on search and question answering from large corpora and/or long document summarization

· Experience building applications for the legal domain, such as document review or document drafting

· Publications at relevant venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, ICML, KDD or similar conferences and venues

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What’s in it For You?

Join us to inform the way forward with the latest AI solutions and address real-world challenges in legal, tax, compliance, and news. Backed by our commitment to continuous learning and market-leading benefits, you’ll be prepared to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future. This includes:

• Industry-Leading 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.

• 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, and hybrid model, 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 skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.

• Culture: Globally recognized and award-winning reputation for inclusion, innovation, and customer-focus. Our eleven business resource groups nurture our culture of belonging across the diverse backgrounds and experiences represented across our global footprint.

• 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.

• Social Impact: Make an impact in your community with our Social Impact Institute. We offer employees two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.

Do you want to be part of a team helping re-invent the way knowledge professionals work? How about a team that works every day to create a more transparent, just and inclusive future? At Thomson Reuters, we’ve been doing just that for almost 160 years. Our industry-leading products and services include highly specialized information-enabled software and tools for legal, tax, accounting and compliance professionals combined with the world’s most global news services – Reuters. We help these professionals do their jobs better, creating more time for them to focus on the things that matter most: advising, advocating, negotiating, governing and informing.

We are powered by the talents of 26,000 employees across more than 70 countries, where everyone has a chance to contribute and grow professionally in flexible work environments that celebrate diversity and inclusion. At a time when objectivity, accuracy, fairness and transparency are under attack, we consider it our duty to pursue them. Sound exciting? Join us and help shape the industries that move society forward. 

Accessibility 

As a global business, we rely on diversity of culture and thought to deliver on our goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. Thomson Reuters is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer providing a drug-free workplace.

We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law.

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More information about Thomson Reuters can be found on https://thomsonreuters.com.