Lead Applied Scientist

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Oversee an applied research team throughout the entire product development life cycle, from ideation and proof of concept to production scaling and feedback-driven iteration.

• Take full responsibility for research deliverables across various projects.

• Lead and foster stakeholder engagement with Product, Engineering, subject-matter experts, and Design teams.

• Cultivate a deep understanding of customer challenges and data.

• Sustain scientific and technical expertise through product deliverables, published research, and intellectual property creation.

• Identify cutting-edge technologies relevant to Thomson Reuters products and utilize them to enhance customer value.

• Contribute insights to the business and Labs leadership on the long-term AI strategy.

• Mentor and guide scientists and engineers on best practices while promoting innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.

• Design and implement AI solutions using NLP, information retrieval, machine learning, and generative AI.

• Employ information retrieval techniques, prompting workflows, model training, and evaluation design to build and refine solutions.

⛳️ Requirements

• PhD in a relevant field or a master’s degree with equivalent experience.

• Over 7 years of practical experience in developing NLP/IR systems for commercial applications.

• Proven experience in writing production code and ensuring efficient software delivery.

• Demonstrated ability to translate complex issues into effective AI applications.

• Professional experience in scaling capabilities and leading teams in an applied research environment.

• Exceptional communication, problem-solving, and analytical skills.

• Commitment to staying informed about the latest research and emerging technologies in generative AI for NLP and IR.

• Experience collaborating with Product, Engineering, and other business stakeholders in an agile context.

• Solid grasp of classical ML techniques applicable to NLP challenges.

• Strong understanding of deep learning methodologies for NLP tasks, including transformer-based models.

• Familiarity with the inner workings of large language models.

• Experience with text-intensive NLP projects.

• Hands-on experience in curating and optimizing datasets for evaluating ML and LLM-based solutions, including AutoEval methods.

• Practical knowledge of generative AI technologies, including prompt engineering, in-context learning, chain-of-thought techniques, prompt optimization, auto-evaluation, function calling, and controlled generation.

• Experience utilizing RAG frameworks, pre-training/fine-tuning language models, and data curation/generation for training/fine-tuning language models.

• Familiarity with agentic frameworks such as PydanticAI, LangGraph, AutoGen, and Semantic Kernel.

• Proficiency in Python, Git, AWS, and Azure for remote model development and deployment.

• Experience in creating lightweight UIs, iterating on innovative concepts, applying agile development methodologies, and rapid prototyping.

• Preferred: prior experience in developing legal AI systems or solutions that interact with lengthy documents.

• Preferred: experience in creating applications for the legal sector.

• Preferred: knowledge in legal, compliance, or regulatory areas; a law degree (J.D.); experience as a paralegal.

• Preferred: publications in relevant forums such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, ICML, KDD, or similar venues.

• Preferred: understanding of MLOps and the complete lifecycle of software applications involving AI models.

🏝️ Benefits

• Work remotely for up to 8 weeks annually.

• Flexible vacation policy.

• Two company-wide Mental Health Days off.

• Access to the Headspace app.

• Retirement savings plan.

• Tuition reimbursement program.

• Employee incentive initiatives.

• Resources for mental, physical, and financial wellness.

• Two paid volunteer days off each year.

• Opportunities to participate in pro-bono consulting projects and ESG initiatives.

• Flexible work arrangements.

• Career development and ongoing learning through the Grow My Way program.

• Supportive workplace policies via Flex My Way.