Manager, Applied Research

at  Thomson Reuters

Are you excited about working at the forefront of applied research in an industry setting? Thomson Reuters Labs in London is seeking a hands-on people manager to lead a team of high performing applied scientists, with a passion for solving problems using state-of-the-art Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.
What does Thomson Reuters Labs do? We experiment, we build, we deliver. We support the organization and our customers through applied research in informational retrieval, natural language processing and machine learning. We work closely with product and domain experts to identify compelling solutions at the intersection of user need and technical feasibility. Our team is responsible for designing the next generation of research technology for Legal and Tax Professionals in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. We own AI innovation for Thomson Reuters’ core research products, including Westlaw, Practical Law, and Checkpoint.
The Labs Legal Technology team is seeking an exceptional manager to lead a cross-functional team with significant product scope. This team is responsible for designing, developing, and delivering AI capabilities to Thomson Reuters’ Legal Technology product portfolio focusing on contract drafting and review. These products include CoCounsel, CoCounsel Drafting, Document Intelligence, HighQ, Contract Express, and Legal Tracker, among others. As a manager on this team, you will directly influence AI strategy and the feature roadmap through ideation and rapid prototyping in close collaboration with Product and Design counterparts. In addition to research and prototyping, this team also writes functional, scalable, and reliable software that runs in our products. The combined scope requires a highly efficient, agile approach to both research and development. Strong experimental design and evaluation are also essential given the complexity of the domain and the high stakes nature of the work our customers rely on our technology to perform.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As Manager, Applied Research you will:

• Lead: You will build a high performing team through servant leadership by setting clear expectations, modeling expected behaviors and actively coaching. You will be a proactive communicator who is excited to share their work and even more excited to highlight the accomplishments of their team. You will be articulate and compelling in describing ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Deliver: With a sense of urgency and the desire to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, you will translate complex business problems into solutions with clearly defined outcomes and break down complex ideas into tractable incremental milestones. You will drive the end-to-end model development lifecycle partnering effectively with a collaborative cross-functional team. Our problems are complex; our solutions are right-sized. You will be accountable for timely, well-managed software deliverables.
• Innovate: You will be empowered to try new approaches, learn new technologies, and take informed risks with good judgement. Furthermore, you will encourage and empower your team to do the same. You will foster innovative ideas to solve real-world challenges. You will help lead the way in growing the understanding and adoption of AI, NLP and IR across the enterprise.

You are a fit for the role of Manager, Applied Research if you have:

• PhD in a relevant discipline or Master’s plus a comparable level of experience
• Significant practical, relevant experience building NLP/IR/ML systems, from ideation to production
• The willingness and ability to write clean, production-ready code (in python, mostly)
• Experience coaching and developing a team
• Demonstrable experience translating complex business problems into solutions with clearly defined scope and executing on that vision with demonstrated succes