Thomson Reuters
Vice President, Model Research & Development
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
About Thomson Reuters Labs
Thomson Reuters Labs is the global research and development division of Thomson Reuters. We bring together scientists, engineers, and domain experts to explore emerging technologies and develop compelling new AI products.
From research and prototyping to customer success, our work bridges frontier science with practical application. Our innovations help professionals make better decisions, faster – for example, with intelligent legal assistants, automated compliance workflows, or agentic tax engines.
We are always looking for creative, highly adaptable scientists and engineers who enjoy solving hard problems that matter.
Job Description
Thomson Reuters Labs builds and ships custom models for professional workflows requiring fiduciary-grade AI. The Thomson LLM model family was developed by training leading open-weight models on decades of authoritative Thomson Reuters content, with thousands of hours of subject-matter-expert input. Owning the model layer is how we earn trust in the most regulated, highest-stakes professional workflows: it lets us tune for the accuracy, citation-grounding, and jurisdictional awareness our customers require, set our own training and evaluation priorities, and build the unit economics that let AI scale profitably across products used by more than a million professionals.
This role leads that effort: an organization of scientists, research engineers, and embedded subject-matter experts responsible for advancing Thomson Reuters's LLMs. Leadership includes setting direction for the research program and product roadmap.
See the detailed technical report for more information on the latest model release: Thomson 1.0 Technical Report on Hugging Face.
Location: This is a hybrid role that will be based in either Zug, Switzerland or London, UK.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the model-development roadmap end to end (data strategy, training, evaluation, and the release decision) for models that ship to real users across CoCounsel, Westlaw, and Practical Law.
- Set the target for an online, agentic reinforcement-learning pipeline, training with subject-matter experts in the loop, and hold the work accountable to it.
- Ensure data strategy and evaluation approach are rigorous and tied to measurable outcomes.
- Enable new product capabilities to be built directly on Thomson LLMs, with demonstrated cost and/or quality advantages over third-party alternatives.
- Build and retain a senior bench of scientists and engineers, including hiring the next wave of senior IC and leadership talent.
- Partner across product, infrastructure, and editorial/SME teams to align model priorities with what customers actually need.
- Make the model-quality, safety, and cost tradeoffs the role is accountable for, and represent that judgment to executive stakeholders.
Required Qualifications
- Program ownership: You have led a production LLM program end to end (data strategy through training, evaluation, and the release decision) for models that shipped to real users, and personally made or ratified the calls, even where execution ran through your team.
- Technical fluency: Enough command of post-training methods (SFT, preference optimization, RL), distributed training, and evaluation infrastructure to set direction, spot a training run going wrong, and be credible in the room with your own technical leads, without needing to run the experiments yourself.
- Track record: Shipped models, widely-used open-source contributions, or peer-reviewed publications at top research venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP) that speak for themselves.
- Leadership: Experience leading an organization of comparable size and shape (ideally with a manager/director layer beneath you), attracting and retaining senior ICs, and partnering across product, infrastructure, and domain experts.
- Delegation with accountability: Comfortable delegating hands-on post-training and data-strategy execution to your team, while retaining full accountability for the outcomes.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience applying LLMs in law, tax, or another comparably regulated professional domain, or clear evidence you can acquire that grounding quickly.
- Experience with model safety, adversarial robustness, and red-teaming, at the level of setting policy rather than implementing it.
#LI-PFF
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.
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
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.
DISCLAIMER
The above information in this description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.
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.
We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. More information on requesting an accommodation here.
Learn more on how to protect yourself from fraudulent job postings here.
More information about Thomson Reuters can be found on thomsonreuters.com.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Location