Staff Software Engineer, Search Control Plane

Staff Software Engineer, Search Control Plane 

Our vision

We are building the next-generation search platform, with a vision to democratize knowledge construction and consumption at Thomson Reuters. The platform consolidates search systems across Thomson Reuters products and services, serving millions of end users, internal agents, and internal search teams, into a fully managed, customizable, sovereign, and self-serve search platform.

Job Description:

The AI Enabled Software Engineering (AIESE) team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for a highly impactful role at the foundation of the search platform. You will design and deliver a fully managed, highly scalable, and reliable control plane that brings a search system to life and manages its full lifecycle at the click of a button. That means automating the provisioning of Kubernetes, Kafka, ingestion pipelines, and the data plane for query and ingest, with sovereignty and observability built in from the start, and owning the infrastructure that runs every search index. 

Every search system that moves onto the platform depends on what you build, so your work sets how quickly and safely teams across Thomson Reuters can create, change, and operate search on their own. Staff Engineers here define, build, deploy, and operate what they ship. We ship to production constantly, treat delivery friction as a standing engineering priority, and use AI-assisted development as the norm. 

Key Responsibilities:

Control plane and lifecycle 

• Design, build, and own the control plane that creates, configures, upgrades, promotes, and retires search systems on demand, with full lifecycle management at the click of a button. 

• Own automated provisioning of everything a search system needs: Kubernetes workloads, Kafka messaging, ingestion pipelines, and the data plane for query and ingest. 

• Provide the lifecycle workflows for schema changes, reingest, index switch, and rollback, with status that tells callers when an index is ready. 

• Build sovereignty into the platform: tenant data isolation, enterprise identity and role-based access, and the controls that keep each customer's data within the boundaries it requires. 

• Design the configuration data model and persistence layer for system definitions, component registries, index lifecycle state, and audit history, built to scale across tenants and regions. 

• Set the platform's interface standards, including versioned, backward-compatible contracts and clear documentation, and expose what evaluation and experimentation workflows need. 

Search index infrastructure and reliability 

• Own the infrastructure behind every search index (Vespa and OpenSearch): provisioning, capacity planning, health, backup and restore, and the on-call path. 

• Set capacity budgets and limits for reindexing and backfills, in partnership with the retrieval owner who decides when and how they run. 

• Make observability a first-class capability and own platform SLOs for availability, query latency, ingestion throughput, and document freshness, with tracing and alerting across provisioning, ingestion, and the data plane, including agentic retrieval paths. 

• Own the platform's cloud infrastructure as code across environments and the CI/CD pipeline, and drive down delivery friction so the team can ship safely and often. 

• Build security in from the start: least-privilege access, secrets management, encryption at rest and in transit (including customer-managed keys), audit logging, and compliance. 

• Own cost and performance planning as tenants, content, and query traffic grow. 

• Operate what you build: on-call, incident response, and post-mortems that lead to systemic fixes. 

Technical leadership 

• Set architectural principles and design patterns for the control plane and infrastructure, and act as the technical authority other teams turn to. 

• Lead cross-team projects, set priorities, and advise leadership on complex infrastructure and security decisions. 

• Partner with client teams to understand their experience adopting the platform, and feed what you learn into the roadmap. 

• Mentor Senior and mid-level engineers, and help the team use AI-assisted development effectively. 

Required qualifications:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with progression to staff-level scope, including ownership of a functional area and leadership of cross-functional projects. A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience 

• Experience designing, building, and operating production platform or infrastructure services at scale, with strong distributed systems fundamentals, in a language such as Go, Java, Python, or an equivalent 

• Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred), including Kubernetes or another container orchestrator and infrastructure as code 

• Production experience operating a search engine such as Vespa, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch, including capacity planning and index lifecycle 

• Operational rigor: SLO definition, observability, on-call leadership, and learning from incidents 

• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing APIs consumed by multiple teams, with versioning, access control, and a strong developer experience 

• Multi-tenant platform security: identity integration, role-based access control, encryption, and customer-managed keys 

• Experience operating Kafka or another distributed messaging platform in production 

• Experience building internal developer platforms where documentation and ease of adoption are treated as product concerns 

• Tracing and observability for non-deterministic or agentic workflows 

What Success Looks Like 

In the first 90 days 

• Learn the platform's current infrastructure, index footprint, and operational posture, including known gaps in capacity, reliability, security, and developer experience 

• Build relationships with key client teams and the retrieval owner, and understand their pain points 

• Take on-call ownership for your area and begin delivering the highest-leverage near-term improvements 

In the first year 

• Deliver a materially improved control plane: any team can create, change, and promote a search system on its own, with strong multi-tenant isolation and a better developer experience 

• Establish end-to-end SLO coverage and capacity plans across platform services and search indexes, with alerting, runbooks, and architecture decision records 

• Own and deliver a major infrastructure initiative, such as customer-managed keys, multi-region readiness, or agentic observability 

• Become the recognized technical authority for the control plane and search infrastructure 

#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 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 $136,000 USD - $253,000 USD.
For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $118,400 USD - $219,800 USD.
For Ontario, Canada, the base compensation range for this role is $140,600 CAD - $190,600 CAD.

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.

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