Vice President, Model Research & Development in London

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.

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.

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.

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.
• 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.

Summary Location: Switzerland, Zug, Zug; United Kingdom, London Type: Full time