Hiring: Lead Research Engineer, Search & Retrieval Company: Thomson Reuters Location: Eagan, MN Job Posted Time: 2026-09-09 17:58:15 Employment Type: Full-time Target Skills & Keywords: Search & Retrieval, Information Retrieval, OpenSearch, Vespa, Ranking & Re-ranking, Hybrid Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval, RAG Pipelines, Agentic AI, Query Understanding, Ingestion & Indexing Pipelines, Applied Research, Experimentation, Ablation, Baselines, Productionization, Technical Leadership Experience: - Proven experience launching, operating, scaling, and debugging search systems — not just building them - Experience measuring whether systems actually improved retrieval quality - Experience acting as a technical lead, setting direction and delivering through a team - Experience running the exploration → POC → proof of value → productionization loop - Experience partnering closely with applied scientists and feeding production evidence back into research Required Skills: - Rigorous, evidence-driven experimentation: baselines, ablations, and controls before trusting results - Ability to judge which experiments are worth running — and which are not - Designing and building retrieval architectures, ingestion and indexing pipelines, and ranking and re-ranking systems on OpenSearch and Vespa - Building retrieval infrastructure for agentic AI workflows and search agents: tool-facing retrieval APIs, agentic query planning, multi-step retrieval, RAG pipelines, hybrid and semantic retrieval, and query understanding - Building with AI tooling, with healthy skepticism toward outputs from coding agents and experiments alike - Strong communication — able to explain work to engineers, scientists, and product stakeholders, defend design choices, and update on evidence - Self-direction: able to identify the most impactful next step on a messy project and execute Qualifications: - Unusually rigorous with evidence and experimental methodology - Has launched and operated search systems at scale, including debugging in production - Builds with AI tooling rather than around it - Does not wait to be handed a problem; proactively drives impact - Comfortable owning end-to-end delivery, including outcome, quality, timeline, and live system health - Able to lead a squad of 3–5 engineers: set direction, break down work, review designs and code, and unblock the team Compensation: Not specified Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don’t miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!