Hiring: Lead Research Engineer, Search & Retrieval Company: Thomson Reuters Location: New York, NY Job Posted Time: 2026-09-09 17:58:15 Employment Type: Full-time Target Skills & Keywords: Search & Retrieval, OpenSearch, Vespa, Ranking & Re-ranking, Hybrid Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval, RAG Pipelines, Agentic AI, Query Understanding, Ingestion & Indexing Pipelines, Ablation Studies, Experimentation, 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 technical lead for a squad of 3–5 engineers - Experience owning end-to-end delivery of significant search and retrieval projects Required Skills: - 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 and multi-step retrieval, RAG pipelines, hybrid and semantic retrieval, and query understanding - Running the exploration → POC → proof of value → productionization loop - Rigorous experimentation: baselines, ablations, and controls - Building with AI tooling and applying healthy skepticism to outputs - Strong communication across engineers, scientists, and product stakeholders Qualifications: - Unusually rigorous with evidence; reaches for a baseline, ablation, and control before trusting results - Has the taste to know which experiments are worth running and which are not - Doesn't wait to be handed a problem; can identify the most impactful next step on a messy project and execute - Can defend design choices and update on evidence when shown a better approach - Comfortable working shoulder-to-shoulder with applied scientists and feeding production evidence back into research Compensation: Not specified in the job posting. 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!