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Thomson Reuters · 20 hours ago

Principal Software Engineer-AI

United States of America, Frisco, Texas

Full-time

Hybrid

Senior Level, Lead/Staff

$159K/yr - $295K/yr

8+ years exp

Thomson Reuters is building the AI platform that will power the next decade of tax and accounting products. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will own core backend and AI orchestration systems that turn frontier models into reliable, production‑grade workflows at scale.

AdviceAnalyticsFinancial ServicesManagement ConsultingProfessional ServicesRisk ManagementSoftware

H1B Sponsor Likely

Responsibilities

Lead multi‑quarter initiatives that cut across AI, product, and infra (e.g., a new orchestration layer, a low-latency retrieval system, or a unified knowledge base)

Mentor staff and senior engineers, raising the bar on system design, code quality, and AI integration practices across the org

Be the expert in new model capabilities, collaborating closely with AI/ML engineers, researchers, designers, and PMs to translate industry improvements into reliable, user‑facing workflows that accountants trust

Help shape the team’s roadmap, technical strategy, and engineering culture – from experimentation practices to testing, rollout, and postmortems

Architect and implement backend services (Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, Vercel) that power generative AI agents, complex workflows (e.g., tax filing, advisory, audit), and document‑centric experiences

Build and evolve AI orchestration: routing, tool calling, MCP servers, multi‑step workflows, safety and guardrails, and robust error handling around third‑party LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others)

Design for high‑throughput, low‑latency AI workloads: caching, queuing, rate‑limiting, model failover, and cost/performance tradeoffs

Work with large‑scale data: millions of documents, retrieval and search, vector stores, and indexing strategies tailored to tax and accounting use cases

Establish and refine SLOs, observability, and incident response for AI systems that must be correct, auditable, and trustworthy in professional workflows

Qualification

PythonBackend developmentAI systemsDistributed systemsFastAPIPostgreSQLAWSLarge-scale dataCommunicationMentoringTechnical leadership

Required

Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Related Field, or Equivalent Experience

8-10+ years of experience in backend development, building scalable web services and APIs

Deep Python expertise and experience with production systems using frameworks like FastAPI (or similar), relational databases (PostgreSQL or equivalent), and a major cloud provider (AWS preferred)

Strong background in distributed systems: data modeling, API contracts, observability, resilience patterns, and performance tuning under load

Proven track record owning large, complex projects end-to-end: architecture, execution, rollout, and long-term operation

Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with product, design, and ML teams in a fast-moving environment

Demonstrated interest in AI systems and new engineering paradigms: LLMs, agents, retrieval, or similar – you care about what 'AI-native' software should look like

Preferred

Hands-on experience integrating LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) into production applications, including prompt/response management, cost controls, and safety considerations

Experience with AI-adjacent infrastructure: vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, or custom retrieval pipelines

Opinions and experience around automated testing, reliability, and release practices for systems with nondeterministic model behavior

Prior experience in domains where correctness, auditability, and compliance matter (fintech, tax, legal, or similar), or strong interest in applying AI in those contexts

Many of our strongest candidates have bounced between EM and senior IC roles. If you've been managing for the last few years and want to get closer to the hard technical problems again – without giving up scope or career progression – this principal IC role is built for that pivot

Benefits

Hybrid Work Model

Flexibility & Work-Life Balance

Career Development and Growth

Industry Competitive Benefits

Culture

Social Impact

Making a Real-World Impact

Market competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs

Competitive 401k plan with company match

Competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off, paid holidays

Two company mental health days off

Parental leave

Sabbatical leave

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

Access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Company

Thomson Reuters

Glassdoor3.0

Thomson Reuters delivers critical information from the financial, legal, accounting, intellectual property, science, and media markets.

Founded in 2008

Toronto, Ontario, CAN

10001+ employees

http://thomsonreuters.com

H1B Sponsorship

Thomson Reuters has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)

Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship

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Trends of Total Sponsorships

2025 (13)

2024 (12)

2023 (5)