About Us:
Working in technology at Elsevier means that your work really does matter – it changes lives. And you’ll see the real-world impact of your day-to-day efforts.
Elsevier is a global leader in advanced information and decision support for science and healthcare. We believe that by working together with the communities we serve, we can shape human progress to go further, happen faster, and benefit all. For more than 140 years, we’ve helped impact makers to advance science and healthcare to advance human progress, and that same mission drives us today.
If you are looking for a career that inspires progress in science, innovation and health, and allows you to grow every day, join us. Let’s shape progress together.
About the Team:
The Search & AI Platform is Elsevier’s agentic data platform powering products such as Scopus, ScienceDirect, and our next‑generation LLM‑powered research systems. The platform uses agentic services to interrogate our rich knowledge graphs, search and recommendation systems, and our unparalleled collection of research data—delivering insights so the scientific community can collaborate more effectively, work smarter, and publish quality research more quickly.
We are committed to building cohesive teams where communication, support, and innovation thrive. Instead of a top‑down approach, all members are empowered to contribute—great ideas can come from anywhere. We offer a stimulating environment that enables bright, passionate people to do their best work.}
About the Role:
We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer – Search & AI Platform (AI Content Team) to drive the design, delivery, and operation of large‑scale content pipelines and search/indexing systems. You will set technical direction, mentor and grow engineers, collaborate closely with product, data, and platform teams, and ensure our services meet high standards of performance, reliability, and security. You will own key capabilities—content ingestion to centralized storage, enrichment and retrieval, and loading/serving search indexes—that power AI‑enabled products across Elsevier.
Responsibilities:
Lead & mentor a team of software engineers (hiring, coaching, performance, career growth); foster an inclusive, high‑trust culture.
Own technical strategy & architecture for scalable content ingestion, enrichment, retrieval, and search/index pipelines; champion clean code and best‑practice engineering.
Design, prototype, and build robust distributed systems using Java, Python (FastAPI), Kafka, Spark, Airflow, Snowflake, Iceberg, and RDBMS.
Build and operate cloud infrastructure on AWS (compute, storage, observability, security); automate infrastructure and deployments via CI/CD.
Establish engineering excellence: code reviews, testing strategy, performance tuning, reliability engineering (SLOs, error budgets), incident response and postmortems.
Partner cross‑functionally with Product, Data, Security, and Platform to define roadmaps, success metrics (OKRs), and delivery plans; communicate status and risks clearly.
Drive security, privacy, and compliance standards across data flows and services; ensure auditability and governance for content pipelines.
Continuously improve: measure and optimize cost, latency, throughput, and developer productivity; unlock reuse via shared components and platform services.
Additionally, experience with large‑scale content management systems and big data environments is highly valued.
Requirements:
10+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering server‑side applications and distributed systems.
4+ years of hands‑on technical leadership (team lead/tech lead/manager), including mentoring, architectural decision‑making, and driving delivery at scale.
Expert programming skills in Java and Python; strong design skills for distributed, event‑driven architectures.
Deep experience with AWS cloud services, CI/CD pipelines, containerization/orchestration, and production observability.
Practical expertise with Kafka/streaming, Spark/data processing, Airflow/orchestration, Snowflake/Iceberg, and relational databases.
Advocate of engineering best practices: clean code, testing strategies, security‑by‑design, performance, and reliability principles.
Comfortable learning new technologies quickly; able to handle ambiguity and refine high‑level goals into actionable plans.
Outstanding communication, stakeholder management, and collaboration skills; inclusive leadership style that elevates the team.
Work in a way that works for you:
We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organization. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance, and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and your long‑term goals.
Working for you:
We know that your well‑being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. These are some of the benefits we are delighted to offer:
Private Medical/Dental Plan
Savings Fund
Life Insurance
Meal/Grocery Voucher
About Elsevier:
Elsevier is a global information analytics company that helps institutions and professionals progress science, advance healthcare, and improve performance for the benefit of humanity. We empower professionals and institutions to realize the potential of information to improve academic, corporate, and clinical performance, expand human knowledge, and generate positive—often groundbreaking—outcomes in critical domains of human endeavor.
We are committed to providing a fair and accessible hiring process. If you have a disability or other need that requires accommodation or adjustment, please let us know by completing our Applicant Request Support Form or please contact 1-855-833-5120.
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We are an equal opportunity employer: qualified applicants are considered for and treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship status, disability status, protected veteran status, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.
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