Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding

This position is based in either Zug, Switzerland or London, UK. Want to use your experience of building document understanding AI solutions to enhance our leading products in the tax, legal and professional services industries? Document understanding is a foundational intelligence layer that powers every major capability across our legal AI platform—from search and information extraction to agentic reasoning in products like Westlaw, PracticalLaw, and CoCounsel.

You'll build state-of-the-art semantic chunking, document enrichment, and knowledge graph construction systems that serve as the cognitive foundation multiple product teams depend on, working across authoritative legal, tax, and accounting content and extraordinarily diverse customer data. This is a rare opportunity to solve publishing-quality research problems with immediate production impact—your innovations will directly shape how millions of legal professionals research, analyze, and reason over complex legal documents while advancing the capabilities that enable the next generation of intelligent legal AI agents.

You will work across semantic chunking, document enrichment, intelligent classification, information extraction, knowledge graph construction, and tabular data understanding for complex legal, tax, and accounting content. This work forms the foundation for downstream search, retrieval, reasoning, and generative AI experiences.

About The Role

As Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding at Thomson Reuters, you will:

• Design and deploy semantic chunking systems for lengthy, non-uniformly structured legal, tax, and accounting documents.
• Build document enrichment pipelines that identify document types, jurisdictions, legal concepts, entities, parties, and other domain-specific metadata.
• Develop hierarchical and multi-label document classification systems using both standard and customer-defined taxonomies.
• Build LLM-based and traditional NLP information extraction pipelines that identify entities, relationships, citations, references, and key concepts from unstructured content.
• Develop knowledge graph construction systems that extract, normalize, connect, and enrich entities, legal concepts, citations, and relationships across large document collections.
• Design systems that identify, interpret, and extract insights from complex tabular data embedded within legal, tax, regulatory, and accounting documents.
• Create document intelligence capabilities that support downstream search, retrieval, RAG, and agentic AI workflows.
• Design robust evaluation frameworks for document understanding systems using expert annotations, synthetic datasets, and production metrics.
• Lead technical decisions on document analysis architectures, chunking strategies, extraction methodologies, classification approaches, and knowledge representation frameworks.
• Partner closely with engineering teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and production-ready AI systems.
• Provide technical leadership and input into AI strategy, platform capabilities, and long-term roadmap decisions.
• Mentor applied scientists and machine learning practitioners across the organization.

About You

You're a fit for the role of Lead Applied Scientist, Document Understanding if you have:

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, or a related field, with demonstrable post-degree industry experience developing and deploying document understanding systems at scale.
• Hands-on depth across document analysis, information extraction, classification, knowledge representation, evaluation, and production deployment.
• Successfully taken advanced NLP and AI capabilities from research through production and understand how to transform complex, unstructured content into structured knowledge that powers search, retrieval, reasoning, and intelligent workflows.
• A collaborative mindset where you can mentor and measure success by what ships and performs in production.
• Experience of building production document understanding systems that go beyond basic OCR or document parsing and deliver measurable business impact.
• An understanding of how to transform large collections of unstructured documents into structured knowledge assets, building knowledge graphs from real-world content and using them to improve retrieval, reasoning, and AI workflows and extracting meaningful insights from both natural language and complex tabular content.

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role) 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.