Senior Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

Senior Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

New Position: This position is open due to an existing vacancy to support our evolving business needs.

This applied science position focuses on designing, building, and deploying production-grade document understanding systems that power Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel.

You will work across semantic chunking, document enrichment, and knowledge graph construction for complex legal, tax, and accounting content — delivering foundational intelligence that multiple product teams depend on at scale.

What This Role Involves

• Design and deploy semantic chunking models for lengthy, non-uniformly structured legal documents with adjustable granularity across use cases
• Build document enrichment systems that classify documents according to legal and customer-defined taxonomies and extract rich metadata
• Develop LLM-based knowledge graph construction pipelines that extract and link citations, entities, and legal concepts across diverse legal content
• Build scalable synthetic data generation systems for model training, multi-hop query simulation, and hallucination-free answer generation
• Apply knowledge distillation techniques 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
• Drive independent technical decisions on chunking strategy, classification approach, knowledge extraction methods, and multi-document reasoning architecture
• Partner with engineering on delivery, reliability, and scale across multiple product lines
• Contribute to published research at venues such as ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, SIGIR, and KDD, and to intellectual property

Required Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s in Computer Science, AI, NLP, or a related field
• 5+ 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
• Experience leading through influence in an applied research setting
• 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 for NLP: query-answer generation with verification and scalable data augmentation
• Annotation workflow design and evaluation framework development for document understanding tasks

Preferred Qualifications

• Legal document understanding, legal information extraction, or legal AI applications
• Complex document structures common in legal content: nested hierarchies, cross-references, non-uniform formatting, and embedded elements
• Retrieval, QA, or analysis systems over large document collections
• Knowledge graph frameworks for legal or enterprise applications
• RAG and agentic workflows for enterprise knowledge systems
• 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, 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.

Compensation

Base compensation range varies by location. For eligible U.S. locations, the range is $127,400 USD – $236,600 USD. For Ontario, Canada, the range is $100,000 CAD – $145,000 CAD. Base pay is positioned within the range based on factors such as knowledge, skills, and experience, with an annual bonus possible.

Benefits Summary

Health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs; 401(k) with company match; competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off, paid holidays (including mental health days); parental leave, sabbatical leave; optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance; optional life and AD&D insurance; Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts; fitness reimbursement; Employee Assistance Program; Group Legal Identity Theft Protection; 529 Plan; commuter benefits; Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance; Tuition Reimbursement; Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Thomson Reuters is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer providing a drug-free workplace. We make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and do not discriminate on race, color, sex/gender, pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizenship status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law.

Job Closing Date

This job posting will close 07/23/2026.