Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Silverchair is the premier independent platform partner for scholarly and professional publishers, dedicated to expanding the reach of the world’s most valuable knowledge. They are seeking a Senior AI Engineer to help build the next generation of tools for researchers and publishers, focusing on scalable backend services and innovative AI integrations.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate scalable backend services and APIs that process and serve scholarly content
- Build and maintain data pipelines handling high-volume ingestion, transformation, and indexing
- Build the services and APIs behind user-facing product experiences, working closely with design, product, and frontend engineers
- Design search and discovery systems that return the right result, fast, across large corpora
- Build upstream tooling for peer review and editorial workflows
- Integrate LLMs and other AI capabilities into existing high-volume systems, with the same rigor around latency, cost, and failure handling you'd apply to any dependency
- Evaluate where AI meaningfully improves a product experience — and where a conventional approach is the better engineering call
- Own systems in production: instrument, monitor, debug, and optimize for performance, reliability, and cost
- Make architectural decisions and document the tradeoffs behind them
- Review code, mentor other engineers, and raise the bar for engineering quality across the team
- Collaborate with product and engineering peers to translate user needs into production systems
Skills
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Strong proficiency in a modern backend language — Python, Go, Java, C#, or similar — and the ability to pick up others
- Demonstrated experience building and operating production systems at scale
- Solid grounding in distributed systems: concurrency, caching, queuing, failure modes, and how systems behave under load
- Strong SQL and relational data modeling skills
- Experience building search over large corpora — indexing, relevance, and ranking
- BS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
- Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming data
- Cloud platform experience (Azure preferred)
- Applied experience with LLMs and retrieval-augmented systems in production
- Experience with semantic search and hybrid retrieval alongside traditional keyword search
- Familiarity with ML pipelines and model deployment
- Experience integrating AI models with external tools and data sources
- Infrastructure-as-code and platform/DevOps experience
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