Senior Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval

New Position: This position is open due to an existing vacancy to support our evolving business needs. Senior Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval About the Role This role sits within Thomson Reuters Labs. You will design, build, and ship information retrieval and NLP systems that directly power Westlaw, Practical Law, and Checkpoint. The expectation is production-grade, measurable impact at scale for legal professionals globally. You will own technical delivery end-to-end across large-scale search system design, low-latency retrieval, and evaluation framework development. You will work closely with product and engineering to move from problem definition to shipped, reliable systems. About You You hold a PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, Information Retrieval, or a related field — or a Master's with equivalent depth of industry experience — with 5 years of post-degree industry experience building and deploying IR and NLP systems in production commercial settings. You publish, you ship, and you measure success by what performs in production at scale. What You'll Do Design and deploy large-scale information retrieval systems with explicit focus on search performance, latency optimisation, and retrieval quality at scale Own end-to-end model development across research, data engineering, evaluation, and production deployment Design rigorous evaluation frameworks — component-level and end-to-end — covering precisionK, recallK, latency metrics, and relevance judgement Translate business and customer objectives into concrete technical requirements, scoping feasibility and delivery milestones Partner with engineering on software delivery, MLOps processes, model monitoring, evaluation pipelines, and retraining workflows Operate iteratively in an agile environment, driving quick cycles guided by customer feedback Communicate research through peer-reviewed publications and develop patentable ideas that sustain the competitiveness of Thomson Reuters' products Guide and mentor junior scientists across research, data engineering, and evaluation Required Qualifications PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, Information Retrieval, or a related field — or Master's with equivalent post-degree industry experience — required 5 years of post-degree industry experience building and shipping IR and NLP systems into production — not research-only experience Publications at ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent Production Python and hands-on experience with PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers Hands-on production depth required in: Large-scale information retrieval system design, including index architecture, query optimisation, and latency-constrained retrieval Search evaluation methodology: precisionK, recallK, latency benchmarking, and rigorous offline and online evaluation framework design NLP system development for commercial applications — classification, extraction, ranking, or generation Translating complex, ambiguous business problems into scoped, deliverable AI solutions Collaborating with product, engineering, and business stakeholders in agile delivery settings Preferred Qualifications Hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch in research or production settings — index design, query optimisation, performance analysis Legal domain search, legal IR, or legal NLP experience AzureML or AWS SageMaker #LI-LP2 What’s in it For You? 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. 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 f ... (truncated, view full listing at source)