Director Software Engineering

relx; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working hours

Wellbeing initiatives

Parental leave

Study assistance

Sabbaticals

Job summary

Elsevier is seeking an Engineering Director to lead SciVal, our research-analytics platform, overseeing scaled, secure, data-intensive analytics. You will partner with Product, Data, Architecture, Security and UX to shape strategy, modernise capabilities, and enable AI-assisted experiences for customers.

You will drive engineering excellence, grow technical talent, and deliver roadmaps that support discovery solutions across global teams.

Qualifications

• Experience in software engineering, leading managers and distributed teams across multiple geographies/time zones.
• Large-scale, data-intensive software products in production.
• Setting technical strategy and delivering technology roadmaps.
• Introducing AI-assisted development practices across engineering teams.
• Excellent communication, planning, influencing and stakeholder-management skills.
• Experience with data ingestion, transformation, indexing and query optimisation.
• Understanding of search, discovery and graph-based data relationships in research domains.
• Experience delivering AI-enabled product capabilities such as summarization and intelligent search.

Responsibilities

• Lead SciVal's engineering strategy and technical direction in partnership with Product, Data and Architecture.
• Define and uphold architectural standards across search, data, analytics, APIs and platform integration.
• Balance engineering excellence, innovation, cost efficiency and pragmatic delivery across the platform.
• Lead distributed engineering teams across frontend, backend, data and quality engineering.
• Hire, coach and develop high-performing engineers, engineering managers and technical leaders.
• Own workforce planning, succession planning, performance management and resource allocation.
• Drive planning, prioritisation and execution across multiple engineering teams and programmes.
• Maintain strong engineering standards for code quality, testing, release management, observability and security.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Distributed teams

Technical strategy

Stakeholder management

AI adoption

Job description

Are you passionate about leading large-scale engineering organisations and shaping the future of research analytics through data, AI and modern platform engineering?

Do you enjoy developing engineering leaders, driving technical strategy, and delivering innovative solutions that help researchers make better decisions?

About our Team

SciVal is Elsevier's research-analytics platform. It helps universities, research institutions and funding organizations evaluate research performance, benchmark against peers, understand collaboration networks, identify emerging research areas, and support evidence-based strategic decisions. SciVal is built on trusted, connected research data, including Scopus. Learn more about SciVal .

About the Role

As an Engineering Director supporting SciVal, you will lead multiple engineering teams responsible for delivering a scalable, secure, and data-intensive analytics platform. You will partner closely with Product, Data, Architecture, Quality Engineering, Security, UX and commercial stakeholders to shape technical strategy, modernise platform capabilities, and enable AI-assisted and agent-ready experiences for customers.

You will play a key leadership role in driving engineering excellence, developing technical talent, and ensuring the successful delivery of technology roadmaps that support research analytics and discovery solutions.

Responsibilities

• Lead SciVal's engineering strategy and technical direction in partnership with Product, Data and Architecture.
• Define and uphold architectural standards across search, data, analytics, APIs and platform integration, aligned with Elsevier governance.
• Balance engineering excellence, innovation, cost efficiency and pragmatic delivery across the platform.
• Lead distributed engineering teams across frontend, backend, data and quality engineering.
• Hire, coach and develop high-performing engineers, engineering managers and technical leaders.
• Own workforce planning, succession planning, performance management and resource allocation.
• Drive planning, prioritisation and execution across multiple engineering teams and programmes.
• Maintain strong engineering standards for code quality, testing, release management, observability, security and operational resilience.
• Establish clear operating models for technical debt, production incidents, operational risk and partner delivery.
• Lead platform modernisation, consolidation and adoption of shared technology foundations to improve scalability, reliability and cloud-cost efficiency.
• Partner with Product, UX, Data and customers to improve Research Analytics workflows and enable AI-assisted, agent-ready experiences.
• Communicate technical trade-offs, dependencies, risks and delivery progress clearly to senior stakeholders and roadmap forums.

Requirements

• Experience in software engineering, including significant experience leading engineering managers, engineering leads and distributed teams across multiple geographies and time zones.
• Proven experience delivering large-scale, data-intensive software products in production.
• Demonstrated success setting technical strategy and delivering technology roadmaps.
• Demonstrated experience introducing AI-assisted development practices across engineering teams.
• Excellent communication, planning, influencing and stakeholder-management skills.
• Experience with large-scale data ingestion, transformation, indexing and query optimisation.
• Understanding of search, discovery and graph-based data relationships, particularly within research and scholarly domains.
• Familiarity with analytics-driven systems, knowledge graphs or metadata-rich datasets.
• Experience delivering AI-enabled product capabilities such as summarization, guided workflows, intelligent search or decision support.
• Understanding of making data platforms accessible to AI agents through APIs, metadata, data contracts or MCP-compatible interfaces.
• Experience with AI adoption in SDLC streams.

Work in a Way That Works for You

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation. We offer an appealing working prospect for our people. 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 Pattern

Working flexible hours - flexing the times when you work in the day to help you fit everything in and work when you are the most productive.

About the Business

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 har