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Consulting/Principal Software Engineer
All the relevant skills, qualifications and experience that a successful applicant will need are listed in the following description.
About the team:
The SciVal Development Team is a cross-functional group comprising Frontend, Backend, and Quality Engineers who work closely together. The team collaborates closely with UX and Product to design, build, and deliver high-quality features efficiently and reliably.
SciVal is a data-driven product that provides academic and research metrics to customers, enabling insight, analysis, and informed decision-making. The team focuses on building scalable, reliable solutions while continuously improving usability, performance, and data accuracy.
About the role:
Acts as the technical lead and facilitator for a cross-functional squad. In addition to hands-on design, coding, and/or test automation, this role sets technical direction, shapes delivery plans, drives quality strategy, and unblocks the team through facilitation-not line management. Partners closely with Product, Architecture, QE, SRE/Platform, and adjacent squads to deliver reliable, secure, and observable software.
This role is expected to provide broad technical leadership across all disciplines in the squad, including backend, frontend, quality engineering, and platform concerns, while bringing deeper specialisation in Big Data engineering. The successful candidate should be able to drive and facilitate discussions on FE issues, QE strategy, delivery risks, and operational concerns, while contributing strong expertise in areas such as Databricks/EMR, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, and graph databases such as Neo4j.
Key responsibilities
* Serve as the first line of technical escalation for the squad's services/components.
* Facilitate team ceremonies (refinement, technical grooming, sprint planning, design reviews) with a focus on flow and outcomes.
* Translate product objectives into sound technical designs and testable acceptance criteria; decompose epics into implementable stories.
* Design and implement complex features; complete complex bug fixes and performance improvements.
* Provide technical leadership across backend, frontend, QE, and platform concerns, ensuring balanced decisions across disciplines.
* Bring depth in Big Data / Backend engineering, helping shape solutions involving distributed data processing, search/indexing platforms, and graph/data-intensive systems.
* Drive technical discussions on FE issues, QE issues, architecture trade-offs, delivery risks, and non-functional requirements, even where implementation is led by other specialists in the squad.
* Define and uphold the Definition of Ready/Done, including code quality, automated test coverage, security checks, and observability.
* Establish/maintain CI/CD pipelines, quality gates, and sensible branching/release strategies.
* Drive a pragmatic quality strategy: test pyramid balance, contract tests, data management, environments, and non-functional testing.
* Partner with TIO on SLOs, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post-incident learning.
* Mentor through pairing, code/test reviews, and architecture discussions (no performance management duties).
* Document designs and decisions (e.g., ADRs), and keep technical docs and runbooks current.
* Coordinate dependencies and integration with other squads and external partners; surface risks with clear options/trade-offs.
* Track and improve key delivery/quality indicators (lead time, change fail rate, MTTR, escaped defects, performance budgets).
Requirements
* Around 7+ years of experience in Software Engineering, contributing to complex systems in production.
* Experience leading through influence, such as technical leadership, feature ownership, or community/guild participation across design, delivery, and operations.
* Demonstrated depth in Big Data engineering, with proficiency in at least one of the following areas:
o distributed data processing platforms such as Databricks, Spark, or EMR
o search platforms such as OpenSearch or Elasticsearch
o graph databases such as Neo4j
* Strong understanding of Agile and Lean practices, including backlog refinement, breaking work into incremental deliverables, and risk-aware planning.
* Proficiency in one or more programming languages or stacks, such as Java/JVM, Python, and Scala.
* Familiarity with relational and non-relational databases, including data modelling and performance tuning.
* Experience or familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, containerised environments, cloud fundamentals, and observability tools (logs, metrics, traces).
* Ability to contribute specialist expertise in Big Data / Backend topics while still leading broader squad-level technical conversations across all disciplines.
Why join us?
Join our team and contribute to a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence. If you are ready to advance your career and make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.
Work in a way that works for you
We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation. We offer an appealing working prospect for our people. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and your long-term goals.
* Working flexible hours - flexing the times when you work in the day to help you fit everything in and work when you are the most productive.
Working for you
We know that your well-being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. These are some of the benefits we are delighted to offer:
* Comprehensive Pension Plan
* Generous vacation entitlement and option for sabbatical leave
* Maternity, Paternity, Adoption and Family Care leave
* Flexible working hours
* Personal Choice budget
* Internal communities and networks
* Various employee discounts
* Recruitment introduction reward
* Employee Assistance Program (global)
About the business -
A global leader in information and analytics, we help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. Building on our publishing heritage, we combine quality information and vast data sets with analytics to support visionary science and research, health education and interactive learning, as well as exceptional healthcare and clinical practice. At Elsevier, your work contributes to the world's grand challenges and a more sustainable future. We harness innovative technologies to support science and healthcare to partner for a better world.
We know your well-being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. We are delighted to offer country specific benefits. Click here to access benefits specific to your location.
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