Senior AI Engineer – External Products

Silverchair is the premier independent platform partner for scholarly and professional publishers, dedicated to expanding the reach of the world’s most valuable knowledge. The Senior AI Engineer will help shape the next generation of AI-powered tools for researchers and publishers, designing and building systems that leverage large language models and machine learning to enhance scholarly content accessibility.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement AI-powered search and discovery features using RAG, vector databases, and LLMs
• Design and implement upstream tools for peer review systems
• Build scalable backend services and data pipelines that process and serve scholarly content
• Integrate with frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source alternatives) to deliver intelligent user experiences
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate research needs into production systems
• Optimize for performance, reliability, and cost at scale
• Stay current with developments in AI/ML and bring new ideas to the team

Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong Python expertise, including frameworks like FastAPI or Flask
• Experience building and deploying production systems at scale
• Hands-on experience with vector databases (Milvus, Pinecone, Weaviate, or similar)
• Familiarity with search technologies (Solr, Elasticsearch)
• Experience with SQL databases and event streaming (Kafka or similar)
• Cloud platform experience (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP also valuable)
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• Applied experience with LLMs, RAG architectures, and frameworks like LlamaIndex or LangChain
• Experience with TypeScript and React
• Familiarity with ML pipelines and model deployment
• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar integration patterns
• Background in publishing, healthcare, or research-adjacent industries