Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Job Description:

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.

Key Responsibilities:

• 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, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, or a related field
• 8+ years of industry experience building and scaling document understanding, information extraction, knowledge graph, or applied NLP solutions
• Demonstrated expertise across the end-to-end ML lifecycle, including model development, evaluation, optimization, distillation, and production deployment
• Strong Python programming skills with hands-on experience in PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and DeepSpeed
• Track record of publishing research in leading conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD, or equivalent
• Proven ability to mentor technical talent and drive measurable business impact through production-ready AI systems
• Experience translating advanced research into scalable, high-performing products and services
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical and business stakeholders alike

​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

#LI-SM2

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, 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.

About Us

Thomson Reuters informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. We serve professionals across legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media. Our products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions, and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a world leading provider of trusted journalism and news.

We are powered by the talents of 26,000 employees across more than 70 countries, where everyone has a chance to contribute and grow professionally in flexible work environments. At a time when objectivity, accuracy, fairness, and transparency are under attack, we consider it our duty to pursue them. Sound exciting? Join us and help shape the industries that move society forward.

As a global business, we rely on the unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of all employees to deliver on our business goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, 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.

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 here.

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