Senior Data Scientist - AI Search & RAG Systems

Elsevier; Slough; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Holiday allowance

Private medical benefits

Pension scheme

Share option scheme

Parental leave

Wellbeing programs

Job summary

Elsevier is seeking a Senior Data Scientist I to lead the development and evaluation of advanced search and generative AI systems. You will own complex problem areas end-to-end, drive methodological rigor in evaluation, and contribute to the technical direction of retrieval and RAG systems.

This role requires hands-on experience in search/retrieval, RAG pipelines, and evaluation frameworks, with leadership responsibilities on senior IC paths within the Platform Data Science group.

Qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Experience in data science, machine learning, or applied NLP.
• Strong hands‑on experience with search and retrieval systems (lexical, vector, hybrid).
• Experience with RAG pipelines and LLM-based systems.
• Experience with evaluation methodologies for ML/IR/GenAI.
• Advanced programming skills in Python.
• Experience with modern ML/NLP frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain, LangGraph, Haystack).
• Experience working with Databricks or similar distributed data/ML platforms.
• Strong understanding of experimentation design and statistical analysis.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and optimization of lexical, vector, and hybrid retrieval systems at scale.
• Architect and improve RAG pipelines, including retrieval strategies and prompt design.
• Experiment with embeddings, re-ranking models, and retrieval architectures to improve relevance.
• Collaborate with engineering for robust, scalable, production-ready implementations.
• Define and evolve evaluation strategies for search and generative AI systems across products.
• Design robust evaluation frameworks for IR, GenAI, and annotation strategies.
• Apply state-of-the-art NLP and generative AI techniques to production use cases.
• Collaborate with domain experts to integrate ontologies and structured data into retrieval pipelines.
• Communicate findings to stakeholders and take ownership from problem definition through deployment.

Skills

Search and retrieval

RAG pipelines

ML/IR/GenAI evaluation

Python programming

ML/NLP frameworks

Databricks / distributed platforms

Experimentation & statistics

Education

Master’s or PhD in CS/DS/ML or related

Tools

LangGraph

LangChain

Haystack

PyTorch

Hugging Face

Databricks

Job description

Elsevier is seeking a Senior Data Scientist I to lead the development and evaluation of advanced search and generative AI systems. You will own complex problem areas end-to-end, drive methodological rigor in evaluation, and contribute to the technical direction of retrieval and RAG systems.

This role requires hands-on experience in search/retrieval, RAG pipelines, and evaluation frameworks, with leadership responsibilities on senior IC paths within the Platform Data Science group.