Principal Search Engineer

Role Description

Are you a collaborative Principal Search Engineer (Lucene, Elasticsearch, Solr) looking to work for a mission-driven global organization?

As part of the Search team, you'll contribute to the systems and infrastructure that fuel this mission. We focus on building scalable, reliable, and high-performance retrieval systems that accelerate innovation across Elsevier’s ecosystem.

The Role:

• Design and implement complex search and retrieval systems.
• Mentor team members and help evolve our central search engineering architecture.
• Collaborate closely with product, platform, and other engineering teams to deliver technical solutions and high-throughput services with meaningful real-world impact.

Qualifications

• Expertise with Lucene, Elasticsearch, Solr, or any other search engine, and industry experience with Semantic Search.
• Proven track record building search systems at scale.
• Proficiency in batch processing technologies, including Spark, Spark Streaming, Airflow.
• Expertise in at least one of Java, Python, Scala.
• Deep understanding of distributed system design, data modeling, and performance tuning.
• Strong experience with test-driven development and CI/CD practices.
• Ability to independently drive technical outcomes from problem definition to deployment.
• Familiarity with Agile, Kanban, or other iterative development methodologies.

Requirements

• Leading architectural design and ensuring technical consistency.
• Helping lead our shared search platform – expanding content search, improving relevance via vector and lexical search techniques.
• Building world-class search systems to enhance users’ search experience.
• Automating processes to assist other teams.
• Collaborating on new ideas to optimize systems and engineering workflows.
• Building relationships with other engineering teams to identify and solve their pain points.
• Working across the stack, from development to infrastructure.
• Designing and developing scalable data processing workflows and microservices using Spark, Spark Streaming, and Airflow.
• Writing clean, modular, and testable code in Python, Java, or Scala, aligned with coding standards and architecture guidelines.
• Leading implementation of system components that span multiple services and modules.
• Diagnosing and resolving complex technical issues across distributed systems and data workflows.
• Leading design discussions, code reviews, and architecture sessions to ensure software quality and maintainability.
• Developing and maintaining data models to support analytical and operational use cases.
• Collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders to translate product requirements into reliable engineering solutions.
• Contributing to interviewing, onboarding, mentoring, and technical guidance for less-senior engineers.

Benefits

• U.S. National Base Pay Range: $115,400 - $192,300. Geographic differentials may apply in some locations to better reflect local market rates.
• If performed in New Jersey, the base pay range is $130,284 - $208,116.
• This job is eligible for an annual incentive bonus.
• Country-specific benefits available.