Senior Applied Scientist – Legal Tech

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.