Principal Engineer

CoCounsel is our most advanced AI offering to date — combining generative and agentic AI capabilities to help legal professionals move beyond prompting and start delegating. As a Principal Software Engineer focused on Security & Compliance, you will set the technical direction for how CoCounsel earns and maintains the trust of law firms, corporate legal departments, and government agencies that rely on us with privileged, sensitive, and regulated data every day. You will own the architecture and engineering practices behind our SOC 2, ISO 27001/42001, HIPAA, and FedRAMP programs, turning compliance requirements into resilient, well‑instrumented systems rather than one‑off audit exercises.

This role sits at the intersection of the CoCounsel Legal engineering organization and our security, privacy, and legal/compliance teams, partnering closely with platform, identity, and AI/ML engineering to deliver world‑class, provably trustworthy legal AI experiences at scale.

About The Role

• Own the compliance architecture: Understand and evolve the technical controls that satisfy the landscape of compliance; including but not limited to SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001/42001, HIPAA, and FedRAMP (Moderate/High) requirements across CoCounsel's infrastructure, data pipelines, and AI systems. Work to understand implications of new compliance and/or certifications. Your decisions will shape how every product line proves trust to customers and auditors.
• Build compliance as code: Look to help make the manual better, determine where point-in-time audit prep can be replaced with automated evidence collection, continuous control monitoring, and policy-as-code so that compliance state is observable and provable at any time, not just during an audit window.
• Engineer for real production scale and sensitivity: Design encryption, key management, data residency, tenant isolation, and audit logging for systems handling millions of privileged legal documents and thousands of concurrent AI interactions from professionals doing time‑sensitive work.
• Technical leadership and cross‑functional influence: Partner with Security, Legal, Privacy, and Product to translate regulatory and contractual requirements (customer security questionnaires, DPAs, government agency requirements) into engineering roadmaps. Mentor staff and senior engineers, raising the bar on secure-by-design development, threat modeling, and incident response across the org.
• Reliability and assurance: Establish SLOs, observability, and incident response practices for compliance‑critical systems, and build the internal tooling (dashboards, alerting, control testing) that gives engineering, security, and leadership real‑time confidence in our control environment.

About You

You are a fit for the position of Principal Software Engineer, Security & Compliance if your background includes:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Direct, hands‑on experience building or operating production systems that achieved and maintained SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 (and/or 42001), or HIPAA compliance — not just reading about it in a policy document.
• Experience supporting a FedRAMP authorization process (SSP development, control implementation, 3PAO assessments, or ConMon) at the Moderate or High baseline.
• Deep backend engineering expertise (Python, Java, Go, or similar) and experience with production systems on a major cloud provider (AWS preferred), including how to implement controls natively in cloud infrastructure rather than bolt them on.
• Working knowledge of security control frameworks such as NIST 800-53, NIST CSF, or CIS Benchmarks, and the ability to map technical implementation to specific control requirements.
• Hands‑on experience with identity and access management — authentication and authorization at scale (SSO, SAML, OIDC, OAuth 2.0, RBAC/ABAC), encryption and key management, and audit logging.
• Proven track record owning large, complex compliance or security initiatives end‑to‑end: architecture, execution, audit readiness, and long‑term operation.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with auditors, security, legal, product, and engineering teams in a fast‑moving environment.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Experience achieving or maintaining a FedRAMP ATO with JAB or agency sponsorship, including direct interaction with 3PAOs and federal agency security teams.
• Experience with GRC and compliance automation tooling (e.g., Vanta, Drata, OneTrust, or comparable platforms) and building custom evidence‑collection pipelines where off‑the‑shelf tools fall short.
• Experience in regulated industries handling sensitive data — legal, healthcare, financial services, or government.
• Relevant certifications such as CISSP, CISM, CCSP, or similar.
• Experience building compliance and security controls for AI/LLM systems specifically — model access controls, prompt/response data handling, and safeguards around sensitive or privileged content.

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

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.

Our use of AI within the recruitment process Thomson Reuters utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support parts of our global recruitment process. Unless you opt‑out, our AI system will assess the information provided by you and compare it to the requirements listed for the role, and present the result to our recruitment personnel for further review. The AI system acts as a supporting tool, but there is always a human making the decision if you will be considered for the role.

In the United States, Thomson Reuters offers a comprehensive benefits package to our employees. Our benefit package includes market competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs, as well as a competitive 401k plan with company match. In addition, Thomson Reuters offers market leading work life benefits with competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off, paid holidays (including two company mental health days off), parental leave, sabbatical leave. These benefits meet or exceeds the requirements of paid time off in accordance with any applicable state or municipal laws. Finally, Thomson Reuters offers the following additional benefits: optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance paid 100% by the employee; optional life and AD&D insurance paid 100% by the employee; Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts; fitness reimbursement; access to Employee Assistance Program; Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit paid 100% by employee; access to 529 Plan; commuter benefits; Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance; Tuition Reimbursement; and access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

Thomson Reuters complies with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. The base compensation range varies across locations. Eligible office location(s) for this role include one or more of the following: New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and/or Irvine, CA; McLean, VA; Washington, DC. The base compensation range for the role in any of those locations is $183,100 USD - $340,000 USD. For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $158,900 USD - $295,100 USD. Base pay is positioned within the range based on several factors including an individual’s knowledge, skills and experience with consideration given to internal equity. Base pay is one part of a comprehensive Total Reward program which also includes flexible and supportive benefits and other wellbeing programs. This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.

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.

Thomson Reuters makes reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities, including veterans with disabilities, and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. If you reside in the United States and require an accommodation in the recruiting process, you may contact our Human Resources Department at View email address on click.appcast.io. Disability accommodations in the recruiting process may include things like a sign language interpreter, making interview rooms accessible, providing assistive technology, or other relevant accommodations. Please note this email is not intended for general recruitment questions and we will promptly respond to inquiries regarding accommodations. More information on requesting an accommodation here.

More information about Thomson Reuters can be found on thomsonreuters.com