Lead Applied Scientist, Search & Information Retrieval

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States, +2 more locations.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the design, development, and deployment of large-scale search and information retrieval systems that support Westlaw, Practical Law, CoCounsel, and the next generation of Thomson Reuters search experiences.

• Create and implement search architectures for extensive legal, tax, and enterprise content collections.

• Construct and refine ingestion pipelines that analyze, enhance, and prepare documents for effective retrieval.

• Develop ranking and re-ranking systems utilizing both traditional information retrieval methodologies and contemporary LLM-based techniques.

• Enhance retrieval quality through semantic retrieval, hybrid retrieval, query understanding, and relevance optimization strategies.

• Design evaluation frameworks to assess retrieval performance, relevance, ranking quality, and user outcomes.

• Guide technical decisions regarding indexing strategies, retrieval architectures, ranking models, and search infrastructures.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to provide scalable, reliable, and high-performance search services.

• Contribute to the self-service search platform capabilities utilized by internal product teams.

• Offer technical insights to senior leadership on search, retrieval, and AI strategies.

• Mentor applied scientists and machine learning practitioners throughout the organization.

• Publish research findings and evaluate success through the deployment of production-level systems.

⛳️ Requirements

• A PhD in Computer Science, Information Retrieval, AI, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field is preferred.

• Over 8 years of industry experience in developing production search, information retrieval, ranking, or recommendation systems.

• Publications in SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, WWW, or comparable venues.

• Proficient in Python for production purposes.

• Familiarity with PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and distributed model development.

• Understanding of search engine architecture, indexing systems, and ingestion pipelines.

• Experience in constructing ranking and re-ranking systems.

• Knowledge of information retrieval, semantic retrieval, hybrid retrieval, and vector search architectures.

• Understanding of query understanding, relevance optimization, and search evaluation methodologies.

• Experience with retrieval systems that support large collections of text-rich content.

• Familiarity with LLM-enhanced retrieval, RAG architectures, and retrieval optimization.

• Experience in the end-to-end measurement and evaluation of search quality and user outcomes.

• Background in legal, regulatory, tax, scientific, or other text-heavy fields is preferred.

• Experience in creating retrieval systems over extensive enterprise knowledge repositories is preferred.

• Familiarity with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Vespa, or similar search technologies is preferred.

• Experience in API platform development and self-service search platforms is preferred.

• Background in agentic AI systems with retrieval capabilities is preferred.

• Experience with AzureML or AWS SageMaker is preferred.

• Experience in building systems that integrate search, retrieval, and document understanding functionalities is preferred.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible work arrangements, including the option to work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks each year.

• Flexible vacation policy.

• Company-wide Mental Health Days off (two days).

• Access to the Headspace app.

• Retirement savings plan.

• Tuition reimbursement program.

• Employee incentive programs available.

• Resources to support mental, physical, and financial well-being.

• Two paid volunteer days off each year.

• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance plans (United States).

• 401k plan with company matching (United States).

• Paid sick and safe leave.

• Paid holidays.

• Parental leave benefits.

• Sabbatical leave opportunities.

• Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts available.

• Fitness reimbursement program.

• Employee Assistance Program access.

• Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit.

• 529 Plan access provided.

• Commuter benefits available.

• Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance offered.

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan option.

• Potential eligibility for an Annual Bonus based on both enterprise and individual performance.