Senior Applied Scientist, NLPGenAI

Document understanding is a foundational intelligence layer that powers every major capability across our legal AI platformfrom search and information extraction to agentic reasoning in products like Westlaw PracticalLaw and CoCounsel.

Youll build state-of-the-art semantic chunking document enrichment and knowledge graph construction systems that serve as the cognitive foundation multiple product teams depend on working across authoritative legal tax and accounting content and extraordinarily diverse customer data.

This is a rare opportunity to solve publishing-quality research problems with immediate production impactyour innovations will directly shape how millions of legal professionals research analyze and reason over complex legal documents while advancing the capabilities that enable the next generation of intelligent legal AI agents.

About the role

As an Senior Applied Scientist you will:

• Innovate & Deliver:Design build test and deploy end-to-end AI solutions for complex document understanding tasks in the legal domain. Develop advanced models for semantic chunking of lengthy non-uniformly structured legal documents with adjustable granularity levels for different use cases. Build document enrichment systems that classify documents according to legal and customer-defined taxonomies and extract rich metadata. Create LLM-based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link heterogeneous legal knowledge including citations entities and legal concepts across diverse legal content. Develop scalable synthetic data generation systems to support model training simulate complex legal research queries and generate hallucination-free answers. Work in collaboration with engineering to ensure well-managed software delivery and reliability at scale.
  

• Evaluate & Optimize:Develop comprehensive data and evaluation strategies for both component-level and end-to-end quality leveraging expert human annotation and synthetic data generation. Apply robust training and evaluation methodologies that balance model performance with latency requirements particularly for SLM-based solutions. Apply knowledge distillation techniques to compress large models into efficient SLMs suitable for production deployment.
  

• Drive Technical Decisions:Independently determine appropriate architectures for challenging document understanding problems including: semantic chunking strategies that handle diverse document formats preserve legal document structure and adapt to different granularity needs; document classification approaches that work across varying legal taxonomies and generalize to customer-defined schemas; LLM-based knowledge extraction methods that handle challenges like citation recognition errors and contextual references; multi-document reasoning architectures for generating synthetic multi-hop queries that reflect complex legal research patterns. Balance accuracy efficiency and scalability while solving real-world challenges like handling diverse document formats and content types.
  

• Align & Communicate:Partner closely with Engineering and Product teams to translate complex legal document understanding challenges into scalable production-ready solutions. Engage stakeholders across multiple product lines to deeply understand use case requirements shaping objectives that align document understanding capabilities with diverse business needs including next-generation search and deep legal research.
  

• Advance the Field: Maintain scientific and technical expertise in one or more relevant areas as demonstrated through product deliverables published research at top venues (e.g. ACL EMNLP ICLR NeurIPS SIGIR KDD) and intellectual property.

About You

• PhD in Computer Science AI NLP or a related field or a Masters with equivalent research/industry experience
  

• 5 years of hands-on experience building and deploying document understanding systems information extraction pipelines or knowledge graph construction using deep learning LLMs and NLP methods
  

• Proven ability to translate complex document understanding problems into innovative AI applications that balance accuracy and efficiency
  

• Professional experience scaling yourself and leading through others in an applied research setting
  

• Strong programming skills (e.g. Python) and experience with modern deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch Hugging Face Transformers DeepSpeed)
  

• Publications at relevant venues such as ACL EMNLP ICLR NeurIPS SIGIR KDD

Technical Qualifications

• Deep understanding of document understanding fundamentals: document layout analysis semantic chunking approaches beyond fixed-size or paragraph-based methods document classificationhandling hierarchical taxonomies imbalanced multi-label classification and adapting to domain-specific schemas
  

• Expertise in knowledge extraction and knowledge graph construction: entity recognition and linking relation extraction citation parsing and building graph representations from unstructured text
  

• Expertise in LLM-based information extraction few-shot and multi-task learning post-training and knowledge distillation
  

• Solid understanding of synthetic data generation techniques for NLP including query - answer generation with verification and scalable data augmentation for training specialized models
  

• Solid understanding of efficiency optimization including knowledge distillation model compression and designing SLM-based solutions that balance performance with computational constraints
  

• Solid understanding of DL/ML approaches used for NLP tasks
  

• Experience designing annotation workflows creating high-quality labeled datasets with clear guidelines and developing evaluation frameworks for document understanding tasks

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior work on legal document understanding legal information extraction knowledge representationincluding legal citations and legal domain concepts or legal AI applications
  

• Prior work handling complex document structures common in legal documents: non-uniform formatting nested hierarchies cross-references and embedded elements
  

• Experience with building systems that perform analysis question answering or retrieval across large document collections
  

• Experience with knowledge graph frameworks and methodologies for legal or enterprise applications
  

• Understanding of RAG and agentic workflows for enterprise knowledge
  

• Publications at relevant venues such as ACL EMNLP ICLR NeurIPS SIGIR KDD
  

• Experience working with AzureML or AWS SageMaker

#LI-LP2

Whats in it For You

• Hybrid Work Model: Weve 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 tomorrows 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 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.

• Making a Real-World Impact:We are one of the few companies globally that helps its customers pursue justice truth and transparency. Together with the professionals and institutions we serve we help uphold the rule of law turn the wheels of commerce catch bad actors report the facts and provide trusted unbiased information to people all over the world.

In the United States Thomson Reuters offers a comprehensive benefits package to our employees. Our benefit package includes market competitive health dental vision disability and life insurance programs as well as a competitive 401k plan with company addition Thomson Reuters offers market leading work life benefits with competitive vacation sick and safe paid time off paid holidays (including two company mental health days off) parental leave sabbatical leave. These benefits meet or exceeds the requirements of paid time off in accordance with any applicable state or municipal laws. Finally Thomson Reuters offers the following additional benefits: optional hospital accident and sickness insurance paid 100% by the employee; optional life and AD&D insurance paid 100% by the employee; Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts; fitness reimbursement; access to Employee Assistance Program; Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit paid 100% by employee; access to 529 Plan; commuter benefits; Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance; Tuition Reimbursement; and access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

Thomson Reuters complies with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. The base compensation range varies across locations. Eligible office location(s) for this role include one or more of the following: New York City San Francisco Los Angeles and/or Irvine CA; McLean VA; Washington DC. The base compensation range for the role in any of those locations is $145200 - $269600. For any eligible US locations unless otherwise noted the base compensation range for this role is $126000 - $234000. This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance. Base pay is positioned within the range based on several factors including an individuals knowledge skills and experience with consideration given to internal equity. Base pay is one part of a comprehensive Total Reward program which also includes flexible and supportive benefits and other wellbeing programs.

About Us

Thomson Reuters informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. We serve professionals across legal tax accounting compliance government and media. Our products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data intelligence and solutions needed to make informed decisions and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice truth and transparency. Reuters part of Thomson Reuters is a world leading provider of trusted journalism and news.

As a global business we rely on the unique backgrounds perspectives and experiences of all employees to deliver on our business 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 Employer providing a drug-free workplace.

Thomson Reuters makes reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities including veterans with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. If you reside in the United States and require an accommodation in the recruiting process you may contact our Human Resources Department at. Disability accommodations in the recruiting process may include things like a sign language interpreter making interview rooms accessible providing assistive technology or other relevant accommodations. Please note this email is not intended for general recruitment questions and we will promptly respond to inquiries regarding accommodations. More information on requesting an accommodation here.

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