Principal Platform Engineer, Materia AI

Principal Platform Engineer, Materia AI

Are you excited about building AI-driven software that redefines how professionals work? Join a dynamic and highly skilled team at Thomson Reuters, where we combine the agility and innovation of a startup with the stability and resources of a global leader.

As a Principal Platform Engineer, you will lead the design, development, and evolution of our next-generation cloud-native platforms. You will drive technical strategy, foster engineering excellence, and build highly scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure that empowers our product development teams. You will be a hands-on leader, shaping architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and championing best practices in a dynamic and fast-paced environment.

About the Role:

In this role as a Principal Platform Engineer, you will:

Innovate in a Startup-Like Environment

Be part of a fast-moving, forward-thinking group that is creating AI-driven software for accounting professionals. You'll work with top AI and software development experts, leveraging cutting-edge technology to build intelligent and scalable systems. This role is for the CoCounsel for Accounting team, formed from the recent acquisition of the startup Materia.

Own AI-Driven Systems

Design and productionize backend services that power generative AI agents and orchestration systems. This role requires both creativity and rigor to ensure our AI-driven solutions are performant, reliable, and adaptable to real-world use cases.

Collaborate Across Functions

Work closely with AI/ML engineers, frontend developers, product managers, and SREs to build robust services and developer experiences. Help to build out AI native products for tax, accounting, and audit professionals.

Key Responsibilities:

DevOps:

• Own and improve the developer experience to enable rapid and safe iteration both locally and in production.
• Design, implement, and manage CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Github Actions, Playwright, and Snyk.

Productionization:

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-effective production infrastructure using AWS, Vercel, and AI platforms.
• Establish and enforce platform security best practices, integrating and leveraging AWS security services (e.g., KMS, CloudTrail, GuardDuty) and Thomson Reuters internal infrastructure.
• Design and implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions using tools such as DataDog and LLM observability tools.

Collaboration and leadership:

• Set up the necessary processes and documentation to support a team of 30+ engineers and SREs, and align with product, development, and operations teams on business objectives.
• Foster a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement, exploring new AI technologies and methodologies.
• Stay abreast of industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in cloud computing, DevOps, and site reliability engineering, advocating for their adoption where appropriate.

About You:
You are a fit for the position of Principal Backend Engineer, if your background includes:

Required Experience & Skills:

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Related Field, or Equivalent Experience
• 8+ years of experience in backend development, platform engineering, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), with significant experience in a principal or lead role.
• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS services and architecture, including deep proficiency with ECR, ECS, S3, RDS, Lambda, VPC, IAM, CloudFormation, KMS, and other relevant AWS technologies.
• Excellent communication skills, capable of articulating complex technical concepts clearly and concisely to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Passion for AI-driven software and new engineering paradigms.
• Creative problem solver who enjoys exploring new technologies.
• Dedicated to building high-quality, reliable AI-first systems.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, evolving environment.

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• Experience with AI-driven systems, agent-based architectures, LLM observability tools, and AI APIs from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.
• Experience owning SOC 2 compliant systems end to end
• Knowledge of vector databases, embeddings, or search-based AI.
• Strong opinions on infrastructure design, DevOps, backend testing strategies, and automation.

#LI-ES2

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. 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.
• Culture: Globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more. We live by our values: Obsess over our Customers, Compete to Win, Challenge (Y)our Thinking, Act Fast / Learn Fast, and Stronger Together.
• 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.

In the United States, Thomson Reuters offers a comprehensive benefits package to our employees. Our benefit package includes market competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs, as well as a competitive 401k plan with company match. In addition, Thomson Reuters offers market leading work life benefits with competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off, paid holidays (including two company mental health days off), parental leave, sabbatical leave. These benefits meet or exceeds the requirements of paid time off in accordance with any applicable state or municipal laws. Finally, Thomson Reuters offers the following additional benefits: optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance paid 100% by the employee; optional life and AD&D insurance paid 100% by the employee; Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts; fitness reimbursement; access to Employee Assistance Program; Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit paid 100% by employee; access to 529 Plan; commuter benefits; Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance; Tuition Reimbursement; and access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

Thomson Reuters complies with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. The base compensation range varies across locations.Eligible office location(s) for this role include one or more of the following: New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and/or Irvine, CA; McLean, VA; Washington, DC. The base compensation range for the role in any of those locations is $177,380 - $329,420.For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $154,000 - $286,000.This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.Base pay is positioned within the range based on several factors including an individual's knowledge, skills and experience with consideration given to internal equity. Base pay is one part of a comprehensive Total Reward program which also includes flexible and supportive benefits and other wellbeing programs.

About Us

Thomson 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. At a time when objectivity, accuracy, fairness, and transparency are under attack, we consider it our duty to pursue them. Sound exciting? Join us and help shape the industries that move society forward.

As a global business, we rely on the unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of all employees to deliver on our business goals. 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. Thomson Reuters is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer providing a drug-free workplace.

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.

Learn more on how to protect yourself from fraudulent job postings here.

More information about Thomson Reuters can be found on thomsonreuters.com.