Manager, Software Engineering — Customer Files Orchestration

Software Engineering Manager Overview of the Role CoCounsel Legal is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead the team that owns the Customer Files Orchestration Service – the system that makes a custome r documents usable by CoCounsel Legal's agents. Every file a customer brings to CoCounsel passes through this team: upload, storage, extraction, embedding, and indexing , orchestrated end-to-end. You make millions of customer files available to CoCounse l . Bringing a customer's content together with Thomson Reuters' world-class proprietary content and the latest frontier models – including TR's own custom large language models – is what makes our products highly differentiated and our agent experiences genuinely grounded. This team is a critical part of what makes that combination possible. It is also, unavoidably, a hard distributed systems problem. Supporting millions of files means real engineering: dedicated workers, fair queuing so one busy customer cannot starve another, durable state, idempotent processing, and honest reasoning about consistency and delivery guarantees across systems . The team owns what it builds, designing, implementing , testing, deploying, scaling, and operating the service end-to-end. This role will help take a recently formed , cross-functional group and shap e it into a durable, high-performing engineering team with clear ownership, a stable operational posture, and the credibility to lead decisions about design, roadmaps, and opportunity costs within the team and across stakeholders. Job Description: In this position, you will: Service & Technical Leadership Own customer file orchestration service end-to-end – Upload, storage, content extraction, embedding, indexing, and observability and monitoring – balancing new capability delivery against reliability. Drive API-first execution – The file and workspace APIs this team owns serve s a growing set of consumers beyond orchestration, and this team treats them as a product – clear ownership, versioned contracts, documented behavior, deliberate change management, and independent deployability – not an incidental collection of backend endpoints Lead the team's judgment on the problems that define th e domain – Consistency models ( where eventual consistency is acceptable and where a strongly-consistent read is the only correct answer), delivery guarantees (at-least-once with idempotent processors versus the cost of true exactly-once), lease and heartbeat models for crash recovery, and state transitions across asynchronous service boundaries Own the queuing and flow-control architecture – Fair queuing, rate limiting, backpressure, circuit breaking, dead-letter handling, and autoscaling. Champion full operational ownership – The team de sign s, builds, tests, deploys, scales, and operates what it ships – with on-call, incident response, SLOs, and testing treated as first-class engineering work, not afterthoughts . Partner with platforms and client applications teams to deliver a world class product – Leverage robust orchestration across other (internal and external) services to enable both human users and agents with world-class experiences. Team Management Build and lead the Files Orchestration engineering team – Hiring, onboarding, performance, and career development – turning a recently-formed cross-functional group into a stable team with clear, durable ownership Develop engineers who combine distributed systems depth with real operational responsibility – Lead an engineering team who own s their work from the first line of code to the production dashboard, and who own testing/QA , deployment s , and support rather than handing them off. Translate complex orchestration and scale trade-offs to product managers and business leaders – Making the meaning of a throughput number and the risk in a deadline legible to non-engineers. Establish operating rhythms and ways of working – Establish principled ways of working , empowering the team to own their operating rhythms: roadmap, stand-ups, demos, retros, support rotations, and beyond. Strong technical leadership via effective negotiation and influence – Earn the trust of leaders and external teams, negotiat ing capacity and roadmaps to converge on technical decisions that result in world class products . Strategic Delivery Define and maintain engineering processes – Rigorous design, code review, testing, and instrumentation good enough to proactively identify and fix issues, provide great support and reliable service. Establish service health benchmarks – Ingest throughput, end-to-end time-to-available, failure and retry rates, per-tenant fairness under load, and API reliability SLOs – used to drive continuous improvement rather than to decorate a dashboard. Sequence foundational infrastructure work against product deadlines – Know when to ship the pragmatic stopgap, when to insist on the structural fix, and how to make the difference visible to leadershi p . Align the roadmap with CoCounsel's priorities – Collaborate closely with product management and adjacent engineering teams to deliver high-quality capabilities and strong technical foundations. Key Responsibilities You're an ideal fit if you have: Required qualifications Bachelor's or master's degree – Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. Direct people management experience – 8 + years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years of managing engineers. You have hired, coached, and managed performance, and you want to keep doing it. Large-scale, enterprise orchestration systems – Demonstrated experience designing and operating them in production: pipelines that move large volumes of work through multiple stages, across service boundaries, with retries, partial failure, and long-running steps as the normal case rather than the exception. Extensive AWS and production Python experience – This is a Python service on AWS, and you should be able to engage with the code and the infrastructure credibly. Concurrency in Python, and a healthy respect for how treacherous it is – You understand the GIL and what it does and does not protect you from; you have written and debugged production asyncio code . Containerized workloads on Kubernetes – Our workers and APIs run as pods with event-driven autoscaling. You do not need to write the manifests , but you do need to reason pod-level concurrency, resource limits, scaling behavior, and when scaling out is the wrong answer to a bottleneck. Consistency models – You can explain where eventual consistency is safe and where it silently corrupts a user-visible outcome, and you have debugged the difference in production. Delivery guarantees – At-least-once versus exactly-once, why idempotency is usually the real answer . Queues, fair queuing, rate limiting, and backpressure – Deep, practical understanding, including multi-tenant fairness and noisy-neighbor isolation, and the judgment for where flow control belongs in a system. API-first instincts – Versioned contracts, clear ownership, backward compatibility, and treating an internal API as a product with consumers rather than an implementation detail. You have strong opinio ns about where business logic belongs in a system. Building, owning, and operating a production service end-to-end – You have carried the pager for something and you believe building and operating are inseparable. Distributed systems and cloud fundamentals – Advanced knowledge of distributed systems design, cloud infrastructure, observability, and SDLC best practices . Communication and alignment – Excellent communication and the ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and architecture, including with people who do not report to you. Preferred qualifications Documents and document management systems – Extraction, OCR, format handling, very large files, and the integration surface of third-party DMS platforms are relevant. Team Topologies – This organization uses its vocabul