Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Silverchair is an independent platform partner for scholarly and professional publishers. The company is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build and operate backend services, data pipelines, search infrastructure, and peer-review tooling for external-facing scholarly products, with opportunities to integrate AI and machine learning capabilities.
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
- 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
- Cloud platform experience (Azure preferred)
Benefits
- Remote-first organization
Company Overview