Senior Manager, Software Engineering Search Platform
Job Location:
Frisco, TX - USA
Monthly Salary:
Posted:
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
Job Summary
Senior Manager Software Engineering Search Platform
Overview of the Role
The CoCounsel Legal Integrations team is seeking a Senior Manager Software Engineering to lead the engineering team responsible for building operating and evolving the shared search platform at Thomson Reuters. This platform is the foundation of TRs search capability a managed self-service infrastructure that allows internal client teams to configure deploy and iterate on production search systems in days rather than months accelerating the delivery of high-quality search experiences across TRs legal tax and professional products.
The team owns what it builds defining building testing deploying scaling and operating search infrastructure end-to-end. The Senior Manager is responsible for growing this team from its current early stage into a high-performing product-minded engineering organization that ships to production constantly treats delivery friction as the first problem worth solving and holds itself to the same reliability and developer-experience standards as any best-in-class external search platform. The successful candidate brings deep systems and platform thinking strong people leadership and the credibility to make hard architectural calls alongside world-class engineers and research scientists.
About the Role
In this position you will:
Platform & Technical Leadership
Own the end-to-end platform engineering roadmap spanning document ingestion and processing search engine management query APIs platform control-plane APIs and the cloud infrastructure that ties them together balancing new capability delivery with rigorous management of reliability and technical debt
Drive API-first self-service architectural thinking: ensure that every capability the platform delivers is accessible via a clean versioned well-documented API and that internal client teams can configure and operate search systems without direct involvement from the platform team
Lead the migration from current search infrastructure to the platforms strategic search engine including Vespa adoption while maintaining zero-downtime operations on existing production systems throughout the transition
Champion full-stack operational ownership across the team: the team defines builds tests deploys scales and operates what it ships establishing on-call rotations incident response practices SLO definitions and reliability engineering as first-class team responsibilities not afterthoughts
Build a team culture where AI-assisted development is the default and delivery friction is identified and eliminated aggressively ensuring the team ships to production constantly and that process or tooling obstacles are treated as urgent engineering problems
Partner closely with TR Labs to ensure that new retrieval techniques embedding models re-ranking approaches and agentic search patterns have a clear well-supported path from prototype to production within the platforms architecture including the infrastructure required to serve custom models in production with appropriate latency SLOs versioning and rollback capability
Oversee platform infrastructure including event streaming (Kafka/MSK) cloud services (AWS) observability tooling and security controls including multi-tenant data isolation and customer-controlled encryption
Team Management
Build and lead a team of approximately 10 software engineers (including Staff and Senior levels) managing hiring onboarding performance and professional development with a focus on cultivating deep technical ownership
Develop engineers who bring together distributed systems depth search domain expertise and a strong sense of operational responsibility engineers who own their work from the first line of code to the production dashboard
Foster a culture of empowered ownership where engineers have the autonomy to define the problem the authority to push back on poor technical decisions and the accountability to carry work from design through production operations
Translate complex platform and search concepts to non-technical stakeholders making the value and trade-offs of platform investments legible to product managers and business leaders
Balance the teams platform engineering responsibilities with direct search solution delivery for CoCounsels highest-priority use cases
Strategic Delivery
Define and maintain engineering processes for a team that both builds shared platform infrastructure and delivers production search solutions ensuring rigorous testing code review reliability standards and continuous evaluation of search quality through both offline grading pipelines and online signals such as query performance monitoring A/B experiments and engagement analytics
Establish platform health and developer-experience benchmarks including API reliability SLOs client onboarding time-to-value and search quality metrics and use them to drive continuous improvement
Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies search engines vector databases streaming frameworks AI development tooling agentic retrieval patterns orchestration tools with a clear-eyed assessment of production-readiness and operational implications
Cultivate a strong productive partnership with TR Labs engaging early in the research and experimentation lifecycle to shape platform requirements co-develop integration patterns and ensure that promising AI capabilities have a clear and well-supported path to production
Collaborate closely with product management TR Labs and consuming engineering teams to align the platform roadmap with business priorities across CoCounsel Westlaw and the broader TR product portfolio
About You
Youre an ideal fit if you have:
Required Experience
Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related field
8 years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years in a technical leadership or engineering management role
Demonstrated experience designing and operating large-scale distributed data systems event streaming data pipelines or search/indexing infrastructure at production scale
Strong platform and systems thinking: a track record of building shared infrastructure consumed by multiple teams with a product mindset toward developer experience and internal customer satisfaction
Experience leading teams that own their production systems end-to-end including on-call responsibilities SLO management and incident response with a clear philosophy that building and operating are inseparable
Proven ability to build high-velocity engineering teams: reducing delivery friction enabling constant production deployments and embedding AI-assisted development practices as a team norm
Advanced knowledge of distributed systems design cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) API design and software architecture
Proficiency in Python and strong software engineering fundamentals including DevOps practices and observability
Familiarity with information retrieval search systems or vector/hybrid search concepts sufficient to make sound architectural decisions and partner effectively with search engineers and research scientists
Awareness of AI ethics governance and responsible technology deployment
Strong leadership skills: proficiency in agile methodologies excellent communication and the ability to build alignment across engineering product and science teams
Preferred Experience
Hands-on experience with search engines such as Vespa OpenSearch Elasticsearch or Solr
Experience building multi-tenant platform infrastructure with strong data isolation customer-managed encryption or other enterprise security requirements
Background in event-driven architectures and stream processing frameworks (Kafka MSK or similar)
Experience partnering with AI/ML research teams to operationalize retrieval models embedding pipelines or re-ranking systems
What Success Looks Like
In the first 90 days:
Develop a thorough understanding of the platforms current architecture technical debt team composition and the most pressing gaps in reliability developer experience and delivery velocity
Establish strong working relationships with Staff and Senior Engineers on the team with TR Labs research partners and with the key client teams consuming the platform understanding each stakeholders priorities and pain points firsthand
Complete the hiring process for the open Staff and Senior Engineer roles making high-quality hiring decisions that strengthen the teams technical depth and cultural fit
Identify and begin addressing the highest-leverage near-term improvements to team process delivery friction and operational posture
In the first six months:
Deliver a clear well-reasoned platform engineering roadmap covering Vespa migration milestones self-service API maturity reliability targets agentic search infrastructure requirements and team growth with buy-in from product management TR Labs and key client teams
Establish end-to-end operational ownership across the team: on-call rotations in place SLOs defined for core platform services incident response playbooks documented and a first cycle of post-mortems completed
Demonstrate measurable improvement in team delivery velocity: reduced time from code to production fewer deployment-related incidents and evidence that delivery friction is being identified and eliminated systematically
Build a visible and trusted presence with TR Labs participating actively in early-stage research discussions and establishing a reliable integration pathway from experimentation to production
In the first year:
Lead the team through a major platform milestone a significant phase of the Vespa migration the delivery of a materially improved self-service API or an equivalent initiative with strong technical execution and zero-downtime delivery
Grow the team into a high-performing engineering organization where full-stack ownership constant shipping and AI-assisted development are embedded habits rather than aspirational goals
Establish the search platform as a trusted well-documented and measurably reliable internal product with client teams able to onboard configure and iterate on search systems without direct platform team involvement
Become a recognized technical and organizational leader within ACE providing strategic input on platform direction influencing cross-team engineering standards and developing the next generation of Staff-level engineers on the team
#LI-SM2
This posting is for proactive recruitment purposes and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies within our organization.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.
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.
We are powered by the talents of 26000 employees across more than 70 countries where everyone has a chance to contribute and grow professionally in flexible work environments. 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.
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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Senior Manager
About Company
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