Staff Software Engineer, AI Product Engineering

Thomson Reuters is looking for a Staff Software Engineer, AI Product Engineering to help shape and build the next generation of AI-powered software for tax and accounting professionals. You will join the CoCounsel for Tax & Accounting organization, working in a fast-moving, product-focused environment that combines startup-style ownership with the scale and resources of Thomson Reuters. This is a highly hands-on Staff-level engineering role for someone who thrives in greenfield and 0→1 product development . You will be expected to take ambiguous product and technical problems, define the right architecture, build critical parts of the solution yourself, and help guide other engineers from prototype through production. This is a hybrid role, with opportunities based in New York City, Minneapolis–St. Paul, or Toronto . Candidates should be comfortable working onsite as part of the team’s hybrid schedule. Final interviews may also be conducted onsite at the hiring hub associated with the candidate’s location. About the Role As a Staff Software Engineer, AI Product Engineering, you will: Own greenfield and 0→1 AI systems, taking ambiguous product problems from technical discovery and architecture through implementation, production launch, monitoring, and iteration. Design and build production backend services using Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and AWS. Build and evolve AI-native applications incorporating large language models, AI agents, orchestration, retrieval, tool/function calling, and real-time AI workflows. Integrate models and services from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model platforms. Design scalable APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and distributed services for high-volume, production-grade AI applications. Make and influence architectural decisions across reliability, scalability, latency, observability, security, testing, failure handling, and maintainability. Establish reusable engineering patterns and technical standards that improve consistency and velocity across multiple teams or workstreams. Evaluate AI behavior in production and build mechanisms for quality measurement, experimentation, evaluation, guardrails, and continuous improvement. Partner closely with Product and Design to translate complex customer problems into simple, scalable technical solutions. Provide technical leadership across complex, cross-functional initiatives while remaining hands-on in design, implementation, debugging, and code review. Mentor engineers, raise the technical bar, and help teams make sound architectural and engineering trade-offs. Identify technical risks early and drive solutions across multiple systems or teams. About You You are a strong fit for this role if you have: Significant software engineering experience building and operating large-scale, production-grade backend systems. Strong, recent hands-on development experience with Python. Production experience with backend frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or Django, with FastAPI strongly preferred. Experience designing APIs, backend services, data models, asynchronous systems, and distributed architectures. Experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL and building production systems on a major cloud platform; AWS experience is strongly preferred. Demonstrated experience personally designing, building, and launching greenfield or 0→1 products and systems, with clear ownership from architecture through production. Experience making architecture decisions that affect multiple systems, teams, or major product capabilities. Strong system-design skills with the ability to reason through scalability, reliability, performance, failure modes, and operational trade-offs. Experience taking software through the full lifecycle, including architecture, implementation, deployment, observability, debugging, incident response, and production iteration. Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction without relying on formal authority. Strong communication skills and experience partnering effectively across Engineering, Product, Design, AI/ML, and other technical stakeholders. Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and turn incomplete requirements into clear technical direction. Hands-on production experience building generative AI or AI-native applications is strongly preferred. Experience with LLM-powered agents, agent orchestration, tool/function calling, RAG, embeddings, vector search, retrieval systems, or real-time AI interactions is preferred. Experience integrating commercial or open foundation models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar providers, is preferred. Experience building customer-facing SaaS or product software in a startup, scale-up, or similarly high-ownership environment is preferred. Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, and modern cloud-native engineering is preferred. Exposure to TypeScript or modern frontend frameworks is helpful but not required. #LI-TH1 This posting is for proactive recruitment purposes and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies within our organization. What’s in it For You? Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment 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 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. Our use of AI within the recruitment process Thomson Reuters utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support parts of our global recruitment process. Unless you opt-out, our AI system will assess the information provided by you and compare it to the requirements listed for the role, and present the result to our recruitment personnel for further review. The AI system acts as a supporting tool, but there is always a human making the decision if you will be considered for the role. In the United States, Thomson Reuters offers a comprehensive benefits package to our employees. Our benefit package includes market competitive health, dental, vision, disability,