Senior Applied Scientist - Legal Tech

Thomson Reuters
life insurance, parental leave, paid time off, paid holidays, tuition reimbursement, 401(k)
United States, Michigan, Ann Arbor
6300 Interfirst Drive (Show on map)
Apr 07, 2025
Senior Applied Scientist - Legal Tech Are you passionate about developing AI systems that transform the way professionals work? Join Thomson Reuters Labs, where we experiment, build, and deliver cutting-edge solutions in machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI. Our flagship AI assistant, CoCounsel, is designed to streamline complex workflows for legal, tax, and business professionals. We're seeking innovators to help expand its capabilities and impact. At Thomson Reuters Labs, we combine rigorous research with applied development to solve real-world challenges. From enhancing large language model (LLM) reasoning to creating new skills for task-specific applications, we drive impactful solutions for professionals worldwide. About the Role: As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will: Innovate: Develop new skills and capabilities for CoCounsel, focusing on areas such as document summarization, legal research, contract analysis, and reasoning improvement. Lead research initiatives in LLM benchmarking, grounding, LLM agents, and enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models. Build & Experiment: Design, test, and deploy state-of-the-art models that expand CoCounsel's ability to address complex, real-world tasks. Collaborate: Partner with engineering teams, product managers, and stakeholders to translate complex challenges into impactful solutions. Mentor & Lead: Guide and support junior researchers, fostering a culture of learning, creativity, and collaboration. Communicate: Publish findings at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, SIGIR) and contribute to patents, ensuring our solutions are cutting-edge and competitive. Key Responsibilities: Drive the development of AI models to expand CoCounsel's task-specific capabilities and overall performance. Enhance CoCounsel's reasoning, grounding, and responsiveness, ensuring it meets the needs of professional users. Conduct experiments to evaluate AI performance, focusing on reliability, ethical considerations, and user alignment. Work with engineering teams to deploy scalable, production-ready models and co-design ML Ops processes for monitoring and retraining. About You: You're a fit for the role of Senior Applied Scientist if your background includes: PhD in Computer Science, AI, or a related field, or Master's with equivalent research/industry experience. 5+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning models in NLP or IR applications. Expertise in LLMs, including alignment, reasoning enhancement, and grounding techniques. Strong programming skills (e.g., Python) and experience with modern ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow). Proven ability to translate complex problems into innovative AI applications. Preferred Qualifications: Experience developing and deploying AI assistants or task-specific skills in production environments. Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and distributed machine learning systems. Knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation, synthetic data creation, and efficient fine-tuning methods. Publications in top-tier ML or NLP conferences. Why Join Us? Be part of the team shaping CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters' flagship AI assistant. Access to unparalleled datasets, including 60,000+ TBs of legal, tax, and news data. A culture of experimentation, supported by cutting-edge infrastructure and research resources. Opportunities to publish, patent, and present your work while solving high-impact challenges. Competitive benefits, including flexible work arrangements, research time, and professional development funding. We Value Diversity At Thomson Reuters Labs, we understand that diversity of thought, background, and experience fuels innovation. If you're excited about our work in areas such as LLM benchmarking, grounding, agents, and enhancing LLM reasoning abilities but aren't sure you meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply. Your unique perspective and skills could be vital to driving our research and solutions forward. #LI-LP2 What's in it For You? 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 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 match. In 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. For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $140,000 - $260,000. 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 individual's 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. This job posting will close 05/07/2025. 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 26,000 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. 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