Data Scientist III - LeapSpace

Elsevier; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive Pension Plan

Home, office, or commuting allowance

Flexible working hours

Personal Choice budget

Internal communities and networks

Job summary

Elsevier is seeking a Data Scientist III to design, build, and evaluate advanced AI capabilities for LeapSpace and the Search & AI Platform. You will work with senior data scientists, engineers, and domain experts to deliver AI-powered research tools used by researchers worldwide.

The role focuses on applied AI, NLP, information retrieval, and LLM-based applications, with opportunities to scale AI-powered workflows and contribute to responsible AI practices.

Qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Information Retrieval, or related field.

Responsibilities

• Develop and improve LLM-powered research workflows: scientific QA, literature summarization, semantic exploration, citation-aware retrieval and reasoning workflows.
• Build and iterate on agentic/multi-step AI workflows using LangGraph and orchestration tools.
• Evaluate AI models and adopt frameworks for experimentation and production use.
• Contribute to prompt engineering, grounding strategies, and hallucination mitigation efforts.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, and domain experts to deliver AI-powered capabilities.
• Communicate technical findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Skills

Python programming

LLM-based applications

NLP

Information retrieval

Experimentation methodologies

Statistical analysis

Data visualization

Team collaboration

Education

Master’s or PhD in Computer Science/ML/NLP

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face

LangChain

LangGraph

Haystack

Databricks

Job description

About the team

Elsevier’s mission is to help researchers, clinicians, and life sciences professionals advance discovery and improve health outcomes through trusted content, data, and analytics. This role sits within Elsevier’s Platform Data Science organization, a centralized AI and data science group responsible for advancing intelligent discovery, retrieval, and generative AI capabilities across Elsevier products and platforms. The organization develops foundational AI technologies that power experiences such as LeapSpace, Elsevier’s AI‑powered research assistant, as well as Elsevier’s broader Search & AI Platform. The Platform Data Science organization works at the intersection of: Search and retrieval systems, Generative AI and LLM applications, AI evaluation and experimentation, Semantic enrichment and knowledge systems, Scalable AI platforms and intelligent workflows.

About the role

We are looking for a Data Scientist III to help design, build, and evaluate advanced AI capabilities supporting LeapSpace and Elsevier’s Search & AI Platform initiatives. This role focuses on applied AI development, retrieval systems, and AI evaluation, helping bring cutting‑edge AI technologies into production experiences used by researchers worldwide. You will work closely with senior data scientists, engineers, product managers, and domain experts across retrieval systems, generative AI, reasoning workflows, evaluation frameworks, and experimentation, contributing to the next generation of AI‑powered scientific discovery tools. This role is ideal for someone with hands‑on experience in applied AI, NLP, information retrieval, and LLM‑based applications, who enjoys building innovative solutions and translating emerging AI techniques into impactful product capabilities.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and improve LLM‑powered research workflows, including: Scientific question answering, Literature summarization, Semantic exploration and discovery, Research insight generation, Citation‑aware retrieval and reasoning workflows.
• Build and iterate on agentic and multi‑step AI workflows using frameworks such as LangGraph and related orchestration tools.
• Apply modern techniques in NLP, Generative AI, Embeddings and semantic representations, Retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), AI reasoning and workflow orchestration.
• Evaluate emerging AI models, tools, and frameworks and contribute recommendations for experimentation and adoption.
• Contribute to prompt engineering, grounding strategies, context management, and hallucination mitigation efforts.
• Support integration of scientific metadata, ontologies, and knowledge assets into AI‑powered workflows.
• Design, develop, and optimize search and retrieval pipelines, including lexical, vector, and hybrid retrieval approaches.
• Contribute to the development and enhancement of RAG systems that integrate LLMs with trusted scientific and biomedical content.
• Experiment with embeddings, re‑ranking models, chunking strategies, and retrieval orchestration techniques to improve relevance and answer quality.
• Support development of semantic search, ranking, and knowledge discovery capabilities.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to deploy and scale AI‑powered solutions.
• Develop and apply evaluation frameworks for search and AI systems, including IR metrics (e.g., NDCG, recall, precision) and LLM and RAG evaluation metrics (e.g., grounding, faithfulness, hallucination detection).
• Build and maintain evaluation datasets, benchmark suites, and annotation workflows.
• Conduct offline experiments and contribute to online experimentation and A/B testing.
• Analyze experimental results and communicate findings to stakeholders.
• Contribute to responsible AI practices focused on quality, reliability, and trust.
• Partner with product managers, engineers, UX researchers, and domain experts to deliver AI‑powered capabilities.
• Communicate technical findings and recommendations clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Contribute to knowledge sharing and adoption of best practices across the Platform Data Science organization.
• Support delivery of projects from research and experimentation through production deployment.

Required qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Information Retrieval, or a related field.
• Experience in data science, machine learning, applied NLP, information retrieval, generative AI, or a related field.
• Hands‑on experience with LLM‑based applications and generative AI systems, RAG pipelines and retrieval systems, Search and retrieval architectures (lexical, vector, hybrid).
• Evaluation methodologies for IR and generative AI systems.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Experience with modern AI/ML frameworks and tooling (e.g., PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain, LangGraph, Haystack).
• Experience working with Databricks or similar distributed data and machine learning platforms.
• Understanding of experimentation methodologies, evaluation frameworks, and statistical analysis.
• Proficiency with data visualization and analytical tooling (e.g., Tableau, Power BI, matplotlib, seaborn).
• Demonstrated ability to independently execute technical projects and contribute to cross‑functional initiatives.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience building AI assistants, agentic workflows, or conversational AI applications.
• Experience working on search, ranking, recommendation, or retrieval systems.
• Familiarity with scientific, biomedical, or scholarly datasets.
• Experience with knowledge graphs, ontologies, or semantic enrichment systems.
• Exposure to production ML systems and MLOps practices.
• Academic or industry research experience in NLP, information retrieval, search, or generative AI.
• Experience working in content‑rich, knowledge‑intensive, or highly regulated domains.
• Working for you – we know that your well‑being and happiness are key to a long and successful career.

Benefits we are delighted to offer

• Comprehensive Pension Plan.
• Home, office, or commuting allowance.
• Generous vacation entitlement and option for sabbatical leave.
• Maternity, Paternity, Adoption and Family Care leave.
• Flexible working hours.
• Personal Choice budget.
• Internal communities and networks.
• Various employee discounts.
• Recruitment introduction reward.
• Employee Assistance Program (global).

About the business

As a global leader in information and analytics, we help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. Building on our publishing heritage, we combine quality information and vast data sets with analytics to support visionary science and research, health education, and interactive learning, as well as exceptional healthcare and clinical practice. At Elsevier, your work contributes to the world’s grand challenges and a more sustainable future. We harness innovative technologies to support science and healthcare to partner for a better world. We know your well‑being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. We are delighted to offer country specific benefits. Click here to access benefits specific to your location. 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. 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. USA Job Seekers: EEO Know Your Rights. 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. We support continuous discovery and uphold the highest standards of content integrity, reliability, and reproducibility so the communities we serve can advance their field of science, healthcare or innovation with confidence. By combining high‑quality content with powerful analytics, we transform complexity into clarity and deliver mission‑critical insights that help professionals make better decisions when it matters most. We deliver insights that help research institutions, governments, and funders achieve their goals. We help researchers discover and share knowledge, collaborate, and accelerate innovation. We help librarians provide verified, quality information to universities. We help innovators turn knowledge into new products. We help health professionals improve patient care and educators train the next generation of doctors and nurses. Connecting quality content and innovative technologies, we make progress go further and happen faster. And by championing inclusion and sustainability, we ensure progress benefits all. With 9,500 employees, over 2,300 technologists in 5 major tech hubs, and more than 60 locations across the globe, we are committed to supporting the scientific and healthcare communities around the world. We offer a diverse range of opportunities across technology, commercial, business, and early career jobs. If you are looking for a career that inspires progress in science, innovation and health, and allows you to grow every day, find your team at Elsevier. Elsevier is part of RELX Group. Let’s shape progress together. Join us. elsevier.com/about/careers