Senior Data Scientist - AI Search & RAG | Flexible Hours

Elsevier; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 54,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Elsevier’s Senior Data Scientist I will lead the development and evaluation of advanced search and generative AI systems, owning end-to-end problem areas and driving methodological rigor in evaluation. You will shape the technical direction of retrieval and RAG systems and work with cross-functional teams.

The role emphasizes production-ready implementations, experimentation, and responsible AI practices, with collaboration across product, engineering, and domain experts.

Qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, ML, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Experience in data science, ML, or applied NLP.
• Strong hands-on programming in Python.
• Experience with ML/NLP frameworks (PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain, LangGraph, Haystack).
• Experience with Databricks or similar distributed data/ML platforms.
• Strong understanding of experimentation design and statistical analysis.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimize lexical, vector, and hybrid retrieval systems at scale.
• Architect and improve RAG pipelines, including retrieval strategies, prompt design, and system orchestration.
• Experiment with embeddings, re-ranking models, and retrieval architectures to improve relevance.
• Collaborate with engineering to ensure robust, scalable, production-ready implementations.
• Define and evolve evaluation strategies for search and generative AI across products.
• Develop evaluation datasets, gold standards, and annotation strategies.
• Guide and review experimental design, including offline evaluation and A/B testing.

Skills

Data science

Machine learning

Applied NLP

Python

PyTorch

Hugging Face

LangChain

LangGraph

Haystack

Experimentation design

Statistical analysis

Education

Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, or related field

Tools

Databricks

LangChain

LangGraph

Haystack

PyTorch

Hugging Face

Job description

Elsevier’s Senior Data Scientist I will lead the development and evaluation of advanced search and generative AI systems, owning end-to-end problem areas and driving methodological rigor in evaluation. You will shape the technical direction of retrieval and RAG systems and work with cross-functional teams.

The role emphasizes production-ready implementations, experimentation, and responsible AI practices, with collaboration across product, engineering, and domain experts.