Distinguished Engineer

LexisNexis is well regarded as a content and technology partner to the legal industry. With our leadership in generative AI, we have a unique opportunity to drive innovation and transform the legal-tech ecosystem.  

This role reports into the CTO, Legal Markets.  

As a Distinguished Engineer on the Global Technology team, you will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for defining and driving architecture, technical strategy, and engineering excellence for high-impact capabilities on the Lexis+ platform. You will partner closely with senior engineering, product, data science, and security leaders to solve the hardest technical problems—especially in areas like GenAI-enabled experiences, scalable platform services, reliability, and modernization—while setting a high bar for quality, performance, and responsible innovation.  

This role requires a highly resourceful, self-driven individual who leads through influence, deep technical credibility, and pragmatic execution.  

Duties and Responsibilities  

Technical Vision & Architecture Leadership  

• Define and communicate an end-to-end technical vision for platform and product capabilities aligned to strategic business goals on Lexis+.  

• Lead architecture decisions for complex, distributed systems; establish patterns and guardrails for scalable, secure, resilient services.  

• Drive modernization of critical components (cloud adoption, microservices evolution, observability, developer productivity), balancing near-term delivery with long-term sustainability.  

• Provide technical leadership on build-vs-buy decisions and integration of third-party systems and services.  

Engineering Execution & Delivery (Hands-on Influence)  

• Partner with engineering teams to translate architecture into delivery plans; remove technical blockers and reduce cycle time.  

• Lead technical design reviews for major initiatives; ensure designs meet standards for availability, performance, security, privacy, and cost efficiency.  

• Contribute to critical code paths and reference implementations as needed; raise the quality bar through exemplars.  

• Champion engineering rigor: testing strategy, code quality, API design, and operational readiness.  

Innovation & Technology Roadmap  

• Evaluate emerging technologies, trends, and industry standards to keep Lexis+ at the forefront of legal tech innovation, including GenAI and multi-model approaches where relevant.  

• Drive proof-of-concept initiatives, prototyping, and pilots to validate value, feasibility, and risk; inform platform and product roadmaps.  

• Establish best practices for responsible AI engineering (quality evaluation, reliability, safety, and governance) in partnership with Data Science, Legal, and Security.  

Cross-Functional & Executive Collaboration  

• Partner with senior leaders across Product, UX, Data Science, Security, and Operations to align technical investments with business priorities and customer outcomes.  

• Influence organization-wide decisions through clear technical narratives, tradeoff analysis, and measurable outcomes.  

• Act as a trusted technical advisor for complex initiatives and strategic planning.  

Operational Excellence & Reliability  

• Define and drive standards for observability, incident response, SLOs/SLAs, capacity planning, and cost management across key services.  

• Use metrics (e.g., DORA, reliability, performance, quality) to identify systemic bottlenecks and drive improvements across teams.  

• Ensure compliance with privacy, security, and regulatory requirements relevant to the legal industry.  

Collaboration & Technical Community Leadership  

• Collaborate with architecture teams and senior engineering leaders to align on enterprise standards, reference architectures, and consistent engineering patterns across domains.  

• Coach senior technical engineers and technical leaders to strengthen design quality, delivery excellence, operational readiness, and engineering craftsmanship.  

• Partner across engineering, product, data science, security, and operations on major initiatives and design reviews to ensure solutions meet expectations for scalability, security, reliability, and cost efficiency.  

• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement by setting high standards and modeling strong engineering behaviors.  

Requirements and Qualifications  

Education  

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).  

Experience  

• 20+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including technical leadership on large-scale, business-critical systems.  

• Proven track record delivering complex, scalable, high-availability products in a global or enterprise environment.  

• Experience with large complex systems operating in a cloud environment.  

• Familiarity with legal tech, content management, and search technologies is a plus.  

Technical Expertise  

• Deep understanding of modern software architecture, cloud-native infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP), microservices, and DevOps practices.  

• Strong proficiency in modern development languages and ecosystems (e.g., Java/J2EE, JavaScript, C#, SQL and related frameworks).  

• Demonstrated ability to use engineering metrics (including DORA and Agile metrics) to inform decisions and improve delivery and reliability.  

• Expertise in software architecture, performance optimization, and continuous improvement of the SDLC.  

• Strong experience with code review practices, testing strategy (including TDD where appropriate), and quality engineering.  

• Experience integrating and governing third-party software/services and working effectively with offshore and domestic partners.  

Leadership (Influence without Authority)  

• Exceptional communication skills—able to convey complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and drive alignment.  

• Strong problem-solving skills with demonstrated ability to lead cross-team resolution of ambiguous, high-impact technical issues.  

• Ability to drive change across multiple organizations, balancing business needs with engineering excellence and customer outcomes.  

Working for You  

We know that your wellbeing and happiness are key to a long and successful career. These are some of the benefits we are delighted to offer:  

• Health Benefits: Comprehensive, multi-carrier program for medical, dental and vision benefits  

• Retirement Benefits: 401(k) with match and an Employee Share Purchase Plan  

• Wellbeing: Wellness platform with incentives, Headspace app subscription, Employee Assistance and Time-off Programs  

• Short-and-Long Term Disability, Life and Accidental Death Insurance, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity  

• Family Benefits, including bonding and family care leaves, adoption and surrogacy benefits  

• Health Savings, Health Care, Dependent Care and Commuter Spending Accounts  

• Up to two days of paid leave each to participate in Employee Resource Groups and to volunteer with your charity of choice  

LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 11,800 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.