Job Description
Principal Scientist, AI Ventures - TR Labs
This hybrid position is based in Zug, Switzerland.
Thomson Reuters are seeking a Principal Scientist to lead and architect the applied research behind Thomson Reuters’ AI Ventures incubation unit within TR Labs.
In this innovative role, you will turn frontier techniques — agentic AI and multi-agent systems, orchestration and tool use, retrieval-augmented generation, and knowledge-graph-grounded reasoning — into the products the unit ships, owning the science from hypothesis through production-ready capability. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who pairs scientific rigor with commercial judgment, knows which approaches from the literature actually work at scale, and builds at startup speed inside a corporate environment.
About The Role
As Principal Scientist, AI Ventures at Thomson Reuters, you will:
Set and drive the applied-research agenda for the flagship platform and new incubation candidates — designing and executing experiments that answer critical research questions while balancing scientific rigor with business impact.
Explore the frontier of agentic AI and multi-agent systems — orchestration, planning, tool use, memory, and evaluation — together with the LLM, RAG, and NLP methods that power autonomous and semi-autonomous workflows, testing what delivers real value in production.
Own end-to-end experimentation and development across the research lifecycle — from data ingestion and model selection to agent design and AI-powered applications — guiding work across research, data engineering, and evaluation.
Translate practitioner workflows and business objectives in risk, compliance, and fraud into technical requirements and testable research hypotheses.
Partner with Engineering to shape an agentic SDLC — embedding AI agents across the software development lifecycle to accelerate experimentation, evaluation, and the path from prototype to production.
Champion developer productivity by putting agents to work in day-to-day engineering — using coding agents and AI-assisted workflows to increase the velocity and quality of research and delivery.
Be accountable for research deliverables across the unit’s projects, setting the standard for experimental design, reproducibility, and the evaluation of agentic systems.
Mentor and coach scientists and engineers, raising the bar on agentic AI, LLM, and NLP best practices.
About You
You’re a fit for the role of Principal Scientist, AI Ventures if you have:
Deep knowledge of agentic AI and multi-agent systems — orchestration, planning, tool use, and memory — with active experimentation across LLMs, RAG, and prompt engineering.
Strong grounding in modern NLP methods, with experience using knowledge graphs to provide structured grounding and reasoning over complex, real-world data.
Excellent coding skills in Python, proficiency with Git and cloud technologies, and experience writing production-quality code.
Demonstrated ability to set a research agenda and design experiments that balance scientific rigor with business impact, translating complex, open-ended problems into successful AI applications — with the judgment to know which techniques from the literature hold up in practice.
Experience working with real-world, messy data in commercial or industry contexts — not just clean benchmark datasets.
Experience co-designing an agentic SDLC and evaluation processes with engineering, including agent-assisted tooling that increases developer productivity, and moving from prototype to production-ready capability at startup speed.
Outstanding communication and analysis skills, with the ability to partner with Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders in an agile way — and to coach and mentor scientists and engineers.
Domain familiarity with risk, compliance, fraud, or adjacent enterprise workflows — able to engage credibly with practitioners and executives and learn new domains quickly.
Passion for staying ahead of advances in agentic AI, multi-agent systems, LLMs, and generative AI, and the ability to incorporate emerging techniques into the unit’s long-term research direction.
Preferred Qualifications
PhD in a relevant discipline, or a Master’s plus a comparable level of research experience.
Demonstrable post-PhD industry experience building NLP / ML / GenAI / agentic AI systems for commercial applications.
Experience operating in global, enterprise-scale environments, partnering with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to deliver AI capabilities.
#LI-JB2
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.
DISCLAIMER
The above information in this description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.
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