Principal Scientist, AI Ventures

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 w