Manager, Software Development Engineering
Thomson Reuters · Toronto +1 · 2mo ago
Manager, Software Engineering
Content Tools • CoCounsel Legal Integrations
Overview of the Role
CoCounsel Legal Integrations is seeking a Manager, Software Engineering to lead the engineering team responsible for building, operating, and evolving Thomson Reuters’ Content Tools platform. Content Tools are the purpose-built APIs and capabilities that give AI agents precise, reliable access to TR’s most valuable legal content — including case law, statutes, regulations, citations, and Practical Law materials. These tools are mission-critical infrastructure: the bridge between TR’s authoritative content assets and the AI-powered products — such as CoCounsel Legal — that depend on them.
The Manager owns the full engineering lifecycle for Content Tools: design, implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing operations. Equally important, this leader will navigate a distributed development model in which tools are built and contributed by multiple teams across the organization. The Manager is responsible for establishing governance, design standards, and contribution workflows that keep the ecosystem coherent as it grows — while serving as the primary engineering accountability point for tool quality, reliability, and developer experience.
This is a people leadership role managing a team of approximately 10 engineers. The successful candidate brings strong platform thinking, a collaborative leadership style, and deep credibility in building API-first systems — ideally in domains where information quality and retrieval precision carry high stakes.
About the Role
In this position, you will provide:
Tool Engineering & Technical Leadership
Own the end-to-end engineering roadmap for Content Tools — spanning tool design and implementation, CLI and SDK exposure, CI/CD pipelines, evaluation infrastructure, and cloud operations — balancing new capability delivery with rigorous quality and reliability standards
Drive an API-first, contract-driven approach to tool development: every tool ships with a versioned CLI contract, schema, and clear ownership metadata that makes it discoverable and usable by consuming teams without direct engineering involvement
Establish and enforce the patterns, templates, and contribution standards that allow distributed teams to build and contribute tools consistently — including review workflows, quality gates, namespace governance, and guidance on when to create new tools versus extend existing ones
Lead the build-out of the information retrieval (IR) evaluation framework, ensuring every tool is validated against representative datasets before release and that performance regressions are caught automatically in CI/CD
Champion full-stack operational ownership: the team defines, builds, tests, deploys, and operates what it ships — including on-call rotations, SLO definitions, incident response, and health monitoring for production tool services
Partner closely with TR Labs and CoCounsel Engineering teams to ensure content tools meet the interface requirements of agentic workflows — covering tool invocation patterns, result provenance,
Oversee platform infrastructure, including cloud services (AWS), observability tooling, rate limiting, caching strategies, and multi-tenant access controls that protect licensed content
Distributed Development Governance
Serve as the engineering accountability point for the Content Tools ecosystem as a whole — not just the tools your team builds directly, but the standards and guardrails that govern contributions from partner teams across the organization
Define and maintain contribution workflows, architectural review criteria, and consistency checks that prevent capability duplication and ensure interoperability across a growing tool catalog
Manage tool lifecycle policies, including deprecation, migration support, versioning strategies, and breaking-change processes — communicating proactively with consuming teams to minimize disruption
Build and maintain a centralized tool registry with machine-readable descriptions, usage guidance, and performance characteristics — making the tool ecosystem discoverable and self-service for agent developers
Establish shared development infrastructure — common libraries, boilerplate generators, mock services, and local development environments — that makes it easy for any team to build tools correctly
Team Management
Build and lead a team of approximately 10 software engineers (including Senior and Staff levels), managing hiring, onboarding, performance, and professional development with a focus on deep technical ownership
Develop engineers who combine strong software fundamentals with domain fluency in information retrieval, content APIs, and agentic system design — engineers who are proud to own their work from first commit to production dashboard
Foster a culture of empowered ownership where engineers have the autonomy to define problems, the authority to make sound technical calls, and the accountability to carry work through to reliable production operations
Translate complex content technology concepts for non-technical stakeholders — making the value and trade-offs of Content Tools investments legible to product managers, business leaders, and partner teams
Model and reinforce AI-assisted development as a team norm: more than 50% of code written with AI assistance is the target, not a stretch goal
Strategic Delivery
Define and maintain engineering processes for a team that both builds shared tool infrastructure and delivers production content capabilities — ensuring rigorous testing, code review, and continuous evaluation of tool quality through offline IR grading pipelines and online signals
Establish platform health and developer experience benchmarks — including tool reliability SLOs, client onboarding time-to-value, IR evaluation pass rates, and tool invocation accuracy — and use them to drive continuous improvement
Evaluate and integrate emerging tool protocols (including MCP support) and retrieval patterns, with a clear-eyed view of production-readiness and operational implications
Cultivate strong working relationships with Labs, Product, and CoCounsel Engineering — engaging early in agentic workflow design to ensure content tools are shaped to the access patterns agents actually need
Collaborate across the organization to align the Content Tools roadmap with business priorities in CoCounsel Legal Next, Westlaw, and the broader TR product portfolio
About You
You’re an ideal fit if you have:
Required Experience
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
6+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership or engineering management role
Demonstrated experience designing and operating API-first systems consumed by multiple teams, with a product mindset toward developer experience and internal customer satisfaction
Proficiency in Python and strong software engineering fundamentals, API design, testing strategy (unit, integration, and IR/evaluation), and CI/CD practices
Experience building and governing shared platform infrastructure in a distributed development model — including contribution standards, versioning policies, and cross-team coordination
Familiarity with information retrieval concepts — including precision/recall trade-offs, hybrid search, citation networks, and document retrieval patterns — sufficient to make sound architectural decisions and partner effectively with scientists
Proven ability to lead teams that own their production systems end-to-end, including on-call responsibilities, SLO management, and incident response
Strong leadership skills: experience in agile methodologies, excellent communication, and the ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and science teams
Awareness of AI ethics, content licensing considerations, and responsible deployment of retrieval systems
Preferred Experience
Experience building tools or APIs for agentic AI systems, including familiarity with tool protocols such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar
Background in legal technology, knowledge management, or other high-stakes information retrieval domains where provenance, accuracy, and entitlement enforcement are critical
Hands-on experience with search and retrieval infrastructure (e.g., Elasticsearch, Vespa, OpenSearch) and the trade-offs between semantic and structured search
Experience with evaluation frameworks for retrieval systems, including dataset design, IR metrics (Precision, Recall, NDCG, etc.), and CI/CD integration of quality gates
Familiarity with content access control, policy-based entitlements, and licensing enforcement in multi-tenant environments
Experience operationalizing tooling for LLM-powered workflows, including prompt engineering, tool description design, and agent invocation patterns
#LI-SM2
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 (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role) 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.
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.
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