Search - Workchat - Senior Data Scientist

Elasticsearch B.V.; East Lindsey; Hybrid; GBP 68,000 - 109,000; Full time

Job summary

A technology company specializing in search solutions is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to improve conversational search quality. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design evaluation pipelines, enhance agent routing, and drive product decisions. Ideal candidates have 5-8 years of experience in applied data science and strong skills in NLP and evaluation methods.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Health coverage

Flexible schedules

Generous vacation days

Parental leave

Volunteer project hours

Qualifications

• 5–8 years in applied data science/machine learning.
• Strong experience with information retrieval and NLP.
• Comfortable with offline metrics and evaluation techniques.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain evaluation pipelines for search.
• Build and compare retrieval and re-ranking baselines.
• Collaborate with backend engineers and product managers.

Skills

Information Retrieval/NLP

Python

PyTorch/Transformers

Pandas

Evaluation expertise

Education

Master's degree in Data Science or related field

Tools

Elasticsearch

Job description

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role:

The Search Conversational Experiences team builds Elastic’s new conversational (agentic) platform that lets customers chat with their own data in Elasticsearch. We own the quality layer for RAG, agents and tools, retrieval/citations, streaming, memory, and—crucially—the evaluation signals that turn open-ended questions into grounded, reliable answers. As a Senior Data Scientist, you’ll be part of a cross-functional team (backend, DS, PM, UX) driving chat quality end-to-end: designing and running evaluation pipelines, improving prompts and tool behaviors, and turning measurements into product decisions that customers can feel.

You’ll help tackle frontier problems—folding RAG and vector search into an agent’s knowledge base, dynamically enriching model context to boost groundedness, shaping agent routing and tool selection policies, lighting up agent-driven visualizations on top of Elasticsearch data, and exploring multimodality and reasoning strategies where they truly move the needle. This is an applied role: you will prototype, evaluate, and partner with engineers to ship.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Design and maintain offline/online evaluation pipelines for conversational search: golden sets, rubric/LLM-as-judge calibration, groundedness/citation checks, and A/B tests.
• Build and compare retrieval & re-ranking baselines (sparse + dense), query understanding, and semantic rewrites; land improvements with clear metrics.
• Use results to drive product decisions: model selection, efficient agent routing, tool gating, and agent customization for Elastic use cases in search and beyond.
• Instrument dashboards and telemetry so helpfulness, faithfulness, latency, and cost trade-offs are visible and trustworthy; guard against regressions in CI.
• Collaborate tightly with backend engineers on contracts (ES|QL, citations, telemetry), and with PM/UX to translate findings into shipped features.
• Share outcomes clearly (docs, notebooks, PRs) and mentor peers in experiment design and evaluation craft.

What You Will Bring:

• 5–8 years in applied DS/ML with strong IR/NLP experience (RAG, dense/sparse retrieval, re-ranking, vector search).
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch/Transformers, Pandas; reproducible experiments (e.g., MLflow), versioned datasets, and clean, reviewable code.
• Hands-on evaluation expertise: offline metrics (nDCG/MRR/Recall@k), LLM-as-judge calibration, groundedness/citation scoring, and online A/B testing.
• Experience turning experimental results into clear product calls (models, routing, tools) and communicating them crisply to cross-functional partners.
• Practical Elasticsearch experience (or similar); ES|QL familiarity is a plus.
• Comfort working in a distributed, async-first environment; strong written communication; low-ego collaboration.

If this sounds interesting, we would love to hear from you! Please include whatever info you believe is relevant: resume, GitHub profile, code samples, blog posts and writing samples, links to personal projects, etc.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component. The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below.

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program.Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched RRSP with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$128,300—$203,000 CAD

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email [e-mail]. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws, view posters linked below: FMLA Poster; Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision Poster; EPPA Poster and Know Your Rights (Poster)

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