Staff Software Engineer, Search Control Plane

Thomson Reuters · United States of America, New York, New York · hybrid The AI Enabled Software Engineering (AIESE) team at Thomson Reuters is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for a highly impactful role at the foundation of the search platform. You will design and deliver a fully managed, highly scalable, and reliable control plane that brings a search system to life and manages its full lifecycle at the click of a button. Key Responsibilities: Design, build, and own the control plane that creates, configures, upgrades, promotes, and retires search systems on demand, with full lifecycle management at the click of a button. Own automated provisioning of everything a search system needs: Kubernetes workloads, Kafka messaging, ingestion pipelines, and the data plane for query and ingest. Provide the lifecycle workflows for schema changes, reingest, index switch, and rollback, with status that tells callers when an index is ready. Build sovereignty into the platform: tenant data isolation, enterprise identity and role-based access, and the controls that keep each customer's data within the boundaries it requires. Design the configuration data model and persistence layer for system definitions, component registries, index lifecycle state, and audit history, built to scale across tenants and regions. Set the platform's interface standards, including versioned, backward-compatible contracts and clear documentation, and expose what evaluation and experimentation workflows need. Search index infrastructure and reliability Own the infrastructure behind every search index (Vespa and OpenSearch): provisioning, capacity planning, health, backup and restore, and the on-call path. Set capacity budgets and limits for reindexing and backfills, in partnership with the retrieval owner who decides when and how they run. Make observability a first-class capability and own platform SLOs for availability, query latency, ingestion throughput, and document freshness, with tracing and alerting across provisioning, ingestion, and the data plane, including agentic retrieval paths. Own the platform's cloud infrastructure as code across environments and the CI/CD pipeline, and drive down delivery friction so the team can ship safely and often. Build security in from the start: least-privilege access, secrets management, encryption at rest and in transit (including customer-managed keys), audit logging, and compliance. Own cost and performance planning as tenants, content, and query traffic grow. Operate what you build: on-call, incident response, and post-mortems that lead to systemic fixes. Technical leadership Set architectural principles and design patterns for the control plane and infrastructure, and act as the technical authority other teams turn to. Lead cross-team projects, set priorities, and advise leadership on complex infrastructure and security decisions. Partner with client teams to understand their experience adopting the platform, and feed what you learn into the roadmap. Mentor Senior and mid-level engineers, and help the team use AI-assisted development effectively. What Success Looks Like In the first 90 days: + Learn the platform's current infrastructure, index footprint, and operational posture, including known gaps in capacity, reliability, security, and developer experience. + Build relationships with key client teams and the retrieval owner, and understand their pain points. + Take on-call ownership for your area and begin delivering the highest-leverage near-term improvements. In the first year: + Deliver a materially improved control plane: any team can create, change, and promote a search system on its own, with strong multi-tenant isolation and a better developer experience. + Establish end-to-end SLO coverage and capacity plans across platform services and search indexes, with alerting, runbooks, and architecture decision records. + Own and deliver a major infrastructure initiative, such as customer-managed keys, multi-region