Head of Research Development in London

Job DescriptionThomson 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. 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. Reporting to the Vice President of Model Research & Development, the Director of Model Research & Development is responsible for hands-on technical direction of the research program, including the evolution of the post-training and data strategy that turns capable base models into accurate, well-calibrated, and trustworthy models for regulated use in professional workflows. You'll work closely with the team designing and running experiments, building training and evaluation pipelines, and publishing findings at top tier conferences. Key ResponsibilitiesOwn the hands-on execution of post-training for Thomson's LLMs: supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization (e.g., Stand up and run the online, agentic reinforcement-learning pipeline, training with subject-matter experts in the loop. Own data selection, mixture optimization, synthetic-data generation, and evaluation design, and be able to point to a specific change and its measured effect on model behavior. Recognize when a training run is going wrong before it finishes, and know what to do about it. Work day-to-day with infrastructure and evaluation teams to keep training and eval pipelines reliable. QualificationsPost-training and reinforcement learning depth. Data-centric model development. You've personally shaped data selection, mixture design, synthetic-data generation, and evaluation design, and can point to a specific change and its measured effect. Hands-on command of distributed training, data pipelines, and evaluation infrastructure, able to build and debug these systems yourself, not just direct others who do. Shipped models, widely-used open-source contributions, or peer-reviewed publications at top research venues (e.g., Experience leading a focused technical team (training and/or evaluation), even if smaller in scope than an org-wide leadership mandate. QualificationsExperience applying LLMs in law, tax, or another comparably regulated professional domain, or clear evidence you can acquire that grounding quickly. Continued pre-training and domain adaptation of large base models. 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. 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. 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. About UsThomson 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. Join us and help shape the industries that move society forward. 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. 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. United Kingdom, LondonType: Full time