Principal Software Engineer / Architect – AI, CoCounsel FDE

Job Description

Are you a Principal-level software engineer who enjoys solving complex customer problems while remaining deeply hands-on with technology?

Thomson Reuters is looking for a Principal Software Engineer / Architect – AI, CoCounsel Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) to help design, build, and deliver production AI solutions for some of our most complex customer environments.

This is a highly technical, hands-on individual contributor role. You will work directly with customers, product teams, and engineers to understand difficult business and technical problems, architect solutions, and personally contribute production code. You will also help translate what we learn from customer engagements into scalable capabilities that strengthen the broader CoCounsel product.

We are looking for someone who combines Principal-level architecture and technical leadership with strong hands-on engineering skills. This is not an architecture-only or advisory role.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead highly complex technical and customer engagements from discovery through production delivery.
• Architect, build, and deploy production AI solutions within customer and enterprise environments.
• Write production code regularly and review the work of Senior, Staff, and Forward Deployed Engineers.
• Provide technical direction across complex AI, software architecture, integration, security, and deployment decisions.
• Work directly with customers to understand their technical environments, constraints, and business needs.
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to translate customer learnings into scalable product capabilities.
• Identify patterns across client engagements and recommend improvements to the core CoCounsel platform.
• Guide engineers through complex technical challenges through hands-on development, architecture reviews, mentoring, and technical leadership.
• Influence technical strategy across Forward Deployed Engineering and related product and engineering teams.
• Evaluate new technologies and approaches that improve AI delivery, reliability, scalability, and customer outcomes.
• Communicate complex technical decisions clearly to engineering teams, product leaders, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• Serve as a senior technical representative for Thomson Reuters in high-impact customer engagements.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant technical leadership at the Principal, Architect, or highest individual-contributor level.
• Deep experience designing and delivering complex production software systems.
• Strong hands-on software engineering skills with recent experience personally writing and reviewing production code.
• Significant experience with AI/ML, Generative AI, or LLM-powered systems in production environments.
• Experience architecting and delivering AI solutions that integrate with enterprise or customer-owned infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, system integration, cloud architecture, scalability, reliability, and production operations.
• Demonstrated experience leading highly complex technical initiatives or customer engagements end-to-end.
• Ability to translate customer-specific technical work into reusable, scalable product capabilities.
• Experience providing technical guidance and mentorship to Senior and Staff-level engineers.
• Strong judgment around architecture, technical tradeoffs, security, reliability, and production deployment.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to work effectively with engineers, product teams, executives, and customer stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or deploying LLM, agentic AI, RAG/retrieval, or other Generative AI systems in production.
• Experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, customer engineering, solutions engineering, or another deeply technical customer-facing engineering environment.
• Experience working with enterprise customers and complex customer-owned infrastructure.
• Experience operating within legal technology, financial services, professional services, or other highly regulated environments.
• Familiarity with security, privacy, governance, or fiduciary-grade requirements associated with enterprise AI deployments.
• Demonstrated technical presence through open-source contributions, technical publications, conference presentations, patents, industry leaders…