Director, AI Search & Evaluation: Strategy & Impact

Elsevier; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive Pension Plan

Home, office, or commuting allowance

Generous vacation entitlement and sabb

Employee Assistance Program (global)

Job summary

Elsevier seeks a Director of Data Science – Search & Evaluation in Amsterdam to set the strategic direction for search relevance, evaluation frameworks, and AI quality across platforms. You will lead a multidisciplinary team, influence product strategy, and scale robust methodologies for offline and online experiments.

You will collaborate with Product, Engineering, UX Research, Knowledge Graph, and Applied AI teams to deliver impactful AI capabilities and measurable user outcomes.

Qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, ML, Information Retrieval, Statistics, NLP, or related field.
• Significant experience in Data Science, ML, IR, Search Relevance, Evaluation Systems, or Applied AI.
• Proven leadership of technical teams in cross-functional environments.
• Strong communication and strategic influencing skills.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term strategy for search relevance, retrieval evaluation, and AI quality.
• Lead scaling of evaluation frameworks and experimentation for AI-powered discovery.
• Mentor and grow a high-performing team of data scientists and analysts.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to align AI investments with business priorities.
• Translate complex findings into strategic recommendations for executives.

Skills

Data science leadership

Machine learning

Information retrieval

AI evaluation

Team leadership

Strategic thinking

stakeholder management

Python

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face

LangChain

LangGraph

Haystack

Job description

Elsevier seeks a Director of Data Science – Search & Evaluation in Amsterdam to set the strategic direction for search relevance, evaluation frameworks, and AI quality across platforms. You will lead a multidisciplinary team, influence product strategy, and scale robust methodologies for offline and online experiments.

You will collaborate with Product, Engineering, UX Research, Knowledge Graph, and Applied AI teams to deliver impactful AI capabilities and measurable user outcomes.