AI Software Engineering Lead

Job title: AI Software Engineering Lead

About the Role Join Elsevier as an AI Software Engineering Lead. You will lead a small team of engineers, ensuring delivery excellence and growth, and serve as the SME for the CK AI Service. You will own the technical strategy, including RAG workflow design and API expansion, guiding the platform as it scales.

What You'll Do

• Manage and mentor six direct reports.
• Drive and own technical strategy and execution for CK AI Service, including the design and governance of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows and API expansion.
• Improve delivery velocity, remove bottlenecks, reduce single points of failure, drive standardization, and enable cross-functional alignment as the platform matures.
• Establish a sustainable leadership model to support division and growth.
• Collaborate with our Data Science team to help drive product road map and feature design forward.

What We're Looking For

• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and grow engineering teams, including managing performance, career development, and team health.
• Established track record of creating high-performing, collaborative team environments and reducing knowledge silos.
• Ability to remove blockers, manage priorities, and improve delivery velocity across a team.
• Experience establishing scalable team structures and leadership models to support growth.
• Deep expertise in designing and delivering distributed systems and APIs at scale.
• Ability to define and execute technical strategies, balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform sustainability.
• Experience with microservices architecture, API design, and system integration.
• Proven ability to identify and eliminate single points of failure and improve system resilience.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows.
• Understanding of LLM integration and orchestration, embeddings and vector search, retrieval pipelines and ranking strategies.
• Experience building AI-powered APIs and services for production environments.
• Ability to govern and standardize AI patterns, including evaluation, observability, and performance optimization.

Compensation & Benefits

• U.S. National Base Pay Range: $115,400 - $192,300. Geographic differentials may apply. If performed in New Jersey, base pay range is $136,213 - $217,587.
• This job is eligible for an annual incentive bonus.
• We offer country-specific benefits and programs focused on well-being and career growth.

We are committed to an equal opportunity hiring process.