Manager, Research Science (Foundational Research, Machine Learning)

Manager, Research Science (Foundational Research, Machine Learning)

Are you a curious and open-minded individual with an interest in leading teams conducting state-of-the-art foundational machine learning research? Thomson Reuters Labs is seeking Research Scientist Managers with a passion for leading teams and solving challenging machine learning problems in a data-rich, complex academic environment driven by real-world problems.

Foundational Research is the dedicated core Machine Learning research division of Thomson Reuters. We are focused on research and development, with a particular focus on advanced algorithms and training techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs). We are building a strong foundation of research capabilities across different areas and are looking for managers who can inspire and guide their teams, are willing to roll up their sleeves and participate in designing, coding, conducting experiments, and translating findings into concrete deliverables. Our focus areas are:

• LLM Training (Continued Pretraining, Instruction Tuning, Reinforcement Learning Alignment, Distributed Training, Efficient ML techniques)
• Post-training techniques for planning & reasoning (e.g. LLMs & Knowledge Graphs, Advanced Prompting, CoT pipelines, RAG, Tool use, etc.)
• Data-centric Machine Learning (Synthetic Data, Curriculum Learning, learned data-mixtures)
• Evaluation (Benchmarks, Human-in-the-loop, red teaming/Adversarial Testing, Hallucination detection, ...)

As a Research Scientist Manager, you will play a key part in leading a diverse global team of experts. We hire world-leading specialists in ML/NLP/GenAI, as well as Engineering, to drive the company’s leading internal AI model development. You will have the opportunity to publish your research findings as well as contribute to our proprietary AI model research & development.

About the Role

• Lead: You will be involved in strategic planning, hiring and the management in foundational research. This gives you the opportunity to master your management skills, mentor, lead and help direct reports grow and contribute to the wider group.
• Innovate: You will innovate and create new state-of-the-art ML/NLP/IR/GenAI approaches at the cutting edge of AI research.
• Experiment and Develop: You are involved in the entire research & model development lifecycle, brainstorming, coding, testing, and delivering high-quality reports at leading international academic conferences.
• Collaborate: Working on a collaborative global team of research engineers both within Thomson Reuters and our academic partners at world-leading universities.
• Communicate: Actively engage in sharing our technical findings with the wider community through contributions to seminars, lectures, conferences and/or the sharing of publications and/or technical assets (data & models).

About You

You're a fit for the role if your background includes:

Required Qualifications:

• PhD in a relevant discipline.
• Strong publication record in top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICLR).
• Familiarity with one or more deep learning frameworks (e.g. pytorch, jax, tensorflow, …)
• Experience in ML Research beyond completing a PhD (e.g. supervision, industry experience, leading academic initiatives, …).
• Excellent communication skills to report and present research findings and developments clearly, both orally and in writing.
• Curious and innovative disposition capable of devising novel, well-founded algorithmic solutions to relevant problems.
• Good social skills and ability to motivate, inspire and mentor team members.
• Comfortable in working in fast-paced, agile environments, managing uncertainty and ambiguity.

Preferred Qualifications:

• High-impact publications in top-tier conferences or other influence in the research community.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience leading teams building advanced ML / NLP / IR systems in academia or for commercial applications.
• Extensive experience with deep learning and large-scale model training.
• Experience working on at least one relevant state-of-the-art research topic (see our focus areas) in large language models (LLMs).
• Strong software and/or infrastructure engineering skills and ensuring well-managed software delivery.
• Experience training large-scale models over distributed nodes with cloud tools such as Amazon AWS, MS Azure, or Google Cloud.

Do you want to be part of a team helping re-invent the way knowledge professionals work? How about a team that works every day to create a more transparent, just and inclusive future? At Thomson Reuters, we’ve been doing just that for almost 160 years.

Accessibility

As a global business, we rely on diversity of culture and thought to deliver on our 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.