Staff Software Engineer I in Toronto

The CoCounsel Agent Context team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for Content Tools — the purpose-built APIs that give AI agents precise, governed access to Thomson Reuters’ proprietary legal content across various international jurisdictions. Content Tools are the bridge between TR’s authoritative content and the AI products, such as CoCounsel Legal, that depend on them, and they carry high stakes — every result an agent returns must be accurate and grounded in TR’s authoritative content.

This Staff Engineer defines how those tools are designed, evaluated, and operated, and sets the patterns that every engineer — on this team and on contributing partner teams — builds against. This is a high-leverage role at the intersection of API design, information retrieval, and agentic systems. Staff Engineers here define what to build and why, not just how: they solve ambiguous problems that span multiple teams and systems, and their work is felt well beyond their own code.

The team’s operating principles are non-negotiable. You own your work end-to-end, from the first commit to the production dashboard. You ship to production constantly, and you treat delivery friction as an engineering problem to solve, not a fact of life. You use AI-assisted development as a primary tool, with the majority of code written with AI assistance. And you practice verified spec-driven development: acceptance criteria and an evaluation suite define a tool’s behavior before the implementation exists and gate every change in CI.

Key Responsibilities:

• Set the technical direction for the Content Tools catalog: define the design patterns, schema templates, and contribution standards every tool is built against.
• Drive an API-first, contract-driven approach: every tool ships with a versioned contract, schema, and ownership metadata.
• Architect the retrieval and search layer behind the catalog — relevance and ranking quality on the team’s Vespa based search platform.
• Define the agent invocation model for the catalog: clean tool boundaries exposed over MCP (Model Context Protocol).
• Build and own the shared development and testing infrastructure — common libraries, scaffolding generators, mock services, and local environments.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated progression to staff-level or equivalent technical leadership.
• Mastery of Python and strong fundamentals across API design, testing strategy, system design, and security architecture.
• Track record of designing and operating API-first systems consumed by multiple teams.
• Demonstrated experience designing or owning evaluation frameworks for retrieval or LLM systems.
• Proven reliability ownership at the system level.
• Strong communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building tools or APIs for agentic AI systems.
• Background in legal technology or other high-stakes information domains.
• Hands-on experience operating search and retrieval engines.
• Experience operationalizing tooling for LLM-powered workflows.
• Familiarity with content licensing and policy-based entitlements in multi-tenant environments.

What Success Looks Like:

• Develop a comprehensive mental model of the Content Tools architecture.
• Establish working relationships with CoCounsel Engineering, Product, and TR Labs.
• Ship at least one high-impact improvement.

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model.
• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance.
• Career Development and Growth.
• Industry Competitive Benefits.
• Culture of inclusion and belonging.
• Social Impact opportunities.