Senior MLOps Engineer

Elsevier; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous vacation entitlement

Sabbatical leave

Parental leave

Employee Assistance Program (global)

Internal communities and networks

Recruitment introduction reward

Job summary

Elsevier is seeking a Senior MLOps Engineer to bridge Data Science and Engineering, turning experimental NLP/IR/GenAI models into secure, reliable services. You will work on AI-based features, search and knowledge-graph retrieval within a massive scholarly corpus and contribute to scalable ML platforms.

You will collaborate with data scientists, product managers and responsible AI experts to translate business problems into cutting-edge data science solutions and to deliver end-to-end ML

Qualifications

• Extensive experience shipping ML or search/GenAI systems to production.
• Strong Python, Java, and/or Scala engineering
• Experience with ML/ NLP and data science workflows
• Hands-on with AWS, Azure and/or Google cloud platforms
• Experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch/Solr and graph DBs (e.g., Neo4j)
• Experience evaluating LLM models and GenAI systems
• Familiarity with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Knowledge of Spark and large-scale data processing systems

Responsibilities

• Automate and orchestrate ML workflows across major cloud and AI platforms (AWS, Azure, Databricks, OpenAI).
• Maintain and version model registries and artifact stores for reproducibility and governance.
• Develop and manage CI/CD for ML, including data validation and model testing.
• Implement ML Engineering solutions using ML platforms (SageMaker, MLflow, Azure ML).
• Design and implement GAR+RAG systems and prompt libraries with guardrails for LLMs.
• Design ML pipelines using Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, vector DBs, and graph DBs.
• Build evaluation pipelines with IR metrics and LLM quality metrics.
• Optimize infrastructure costs via monitoring and scaling strategies.

Skills

Python

Java

Scala

MLOps

AWS

Azure

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Solr

Spark

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Tools

SageMaker

MLflow

Azure ML

Job description

Are you passionate about building scalable, reliable machine learning platforms that bring AI models into production?

Do you thrive on automating ML workflows, optimising model performance, and creating robust MLOps solutions at scale?

About the team:

Join the team that powers Elsevier’s research platforms—Scopus/Scopus AI, ScienceDirect/ScienceDirect AI, and journal submission & peer review workflows.

About the role:

You will bridge Data Science and Engineering to turn experimental NLP/IR/GenAI models into secure, reliable, and scalable services. Our systems operate over one of the world’s largest scholarly corpora, so you’ll work on AI-based features (GenAI, Agentic AI, RAG, etc.), search/ranking quality, and knowledge graph-aware retrieval while enforcing content rights and editorial confidentiality.

As a Senior MLOps Engineer, you should be able to define the scope of a project with support of managers and execute that project independently. Individuals in this role can also support the development and training of junior staff. Senior Data Scientist I should be self-sufficient in executing basic methods, and work within their teams to execute increasingly sophisticated approaches to deliver outcomes. They should also support the development of best practices.

Key Responsibilities:

• Automate and orchestrate machine learning workflows across major cloud and AI platforms (AWS, Azure, Databricks, and foundation model APIs such as OpenAI)
• Maintain and version model registries and artifact stores to ensure reproducibility and governance
• Develop and manage CI/CD for ML, including automated data validation, model testing, and deployment.
• Implement ML Engineering solutions using popular MLOps platforms such as AWS SageMaker, MLflow, Azure ML.
• End-to-end custom SageMaker pipelines for recommendation systems.
• Design and implement the engineering components of GAR+RAG systems (e.g., query interpretation and reflection, chunking, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, semantic search), manage prompt libraries, guardrails and structured output for LLMs hosted on Bedrock/SageMaker or self-hosted
• Design and implement ML pipelines that utilize Elasticsearch/OpenSearch/Solr, vector DBs, and graph DBs
• Build evaluation pipelines: offline IR metrics (e.g., NDCG, MAP, MRR), LLM quality metrics (e.g., faithfulness, grounding), and A/B testing.
• Optimize infrastructure costs through monitoring, scaling strategies, and efficient resource utilization
• Stay current with the latest GAI research, NLP, and RAG, and apply the state-of-the-art in our experiments and systems
• Partner with Subject-Matter Experts, Product Managers, Data Scientists and Responsible AI experts to translate business problems into cutting edge data science solutions
• Collaborate and interface with Operations Engineers who deploy and run production infrastructure.

Requirements:

• Extensive experience ML Engineering, MLOps platforms, shipping ML or search/GenAI systems to production.
• Strong Python, Java, and/or Scala engineering
• Experience with statistical analysis, machine learning theory and natural language processing
• Hands‑experience with major cloud vendor solutions (AWS, Azure and/or Google)
• Search/vector/graph technologies (e.g., Elasticsearch / OpenSearch / Solr/ Neo4j).
• Experience in evaluating LLM models
• Background with scholarly publishing workflows, bibliometrics, or citation graphs
• A strong understanding of the Data Science Life Cycle including feature engineering, model training, and evaluation metrics
• Familiarity with ML frameworks, e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, PySpark
• Experience with large-scale data processing systems, e.g., Spark

Work in a way that works for you

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organization. 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 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.

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:

• Generous vacation entitlement and option for sabbatical leave
• Maternity, Paternity, Adoption and Family Care leave
• Internal communities and networks
• Recruitment introduction reward
• Employee Assistance Program (global)

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 harness innovative technologies to support science and healthcare to partner for a better world.