Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

About the Role

This role sits within the applied science function. You will own the design, development, and production deployment of document understanding systems that directly power Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel. The problems are real, the scale is large, and the expectation is shipped, reliable, measurable impact.

You will work across semantic chunking, document enrichment, knowledge graph construction, and synthetic data generation for complex legal, tax, and accounting content. Multiple product teams depend on what this function delivers.

About You

You hold a PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field, with 8+ years of post‑degree industry experience taking NLP and document understanding systems from development to production at scale. You have hands‑on depth across the full applied arc—model development, distillation, evaluation, and deployment. You publish, you mentor, and you measure success by what ships and performs in production.

What You’ll Do

• Design and deploy semantic chunking models for lengthy, non‑uniformly structured legal documents with adjustable granularity across use cases
• Build document enrichment systems using legal and customer‑defined taxonomies
• Develop LLM‑based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link citations, entities, and legal concepts across diverse legal content
• Lead knowledge distillation efforts to compress large models into latency‑constrained, production‑ready SLMs
• Design evaluation frameworks—component‑level and end‑to‑end—using expert annotation and synthetic data
• Own technical decisions on architecture, chunking strategy, classification approach, and knowledge extraction methods
• Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines
• Provide technical input to senior leadership on AI strategy and roadmap
• Mentor applied scientists and ML practitioners on the team

Required Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field — required
• 8+ years of post‑degree industry experience shipping document understanding, information extraction, or knowledge graph systems into production — not research‑only experience
• Publications at ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent
• Production Python and experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and DeepSpeed

Hands‑on Production Depth Required In

• Document layout analysis and semantic chunking beyond fixed‑size or paragraph‑based methods
• Hierarchical, multi‑label document classification with domain‑specific and customer‑defined schemas
• Entity recognition and linking, relation extraction, citation parsing, and knowledge graph construction from unstructured text
• LLM‑based information extraction, few‑shot and multi‑task learning, and post‑training
• Knowledge distillation, model compression, and SLM deployment under latency constraints
• Synthetic data generation and annotation workflow design
• End‑to‑end evaluation framework design for document understanding

Preferred Qualifications

• Legal document understanding, legal IE, or legal AI experience
• Complex document structures: nested hierarchies, cross‑references, non‑uniform formatting
• Retrieval or QA systems over large document collections
• RAG and agentic workflows in enterprise settings
• Knowledge graph frameworks for legal or enterprise applications
• AzureML or AWS SageMaker

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, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
• Career Development and Growth: Continuous learning and skill development via our Grow My Way programming and skills‑first approach.
• Industry Competitive Benefits: Comprehensive plans that include flexible vacation, mental health days, Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, and more.
• Culture: Globally recognized reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work‑life balance.
• Social Impact: Paid volunteer days, pro‑bono consulting projects, ESG initiatives.
• Real‑World Impact: Helping customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency.

We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. More information on requesting an accommodation can be found via our internal portal.

To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations worldwide regardless of race, color, sex/gender, pregnancy, gender identity, 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.

Thomson Reuters complies with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. For eligible US locations, the base compensation range for this role is $147,600 USD – $274,200 USD. For Ontario, Canada, the range is $140,000 CAD – $175,000 CAD. This role may also be eligible for an annual bonus based on enterprise and individual performance. This job posting will close 05/13/2026.