TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer (AI): Providing technical leadership in the design, evolution, and operation of search infrastructure with an accent on Elasticsearch, lexical and semantic search, and scalable distributed systems. Focus on shaping search architecture, defining best practices, and ensuring platform scalability, performance, and future-proofing.

Location: London

Company

%hirify_global% is a global leader in information and analytics, helping researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society.

What you will do

Provide technical leadership and architectural direction for large-scale search systems built on Elasticsearch.
Drive performance optimization and scalability across search indices, queries, and retrieval services.
Oversee deployment and scaling strategies on Kubernetes (EKS), ensuring resilience, observability, and high availability.
Champion clean code, SOLID principles, and engineering best practices, setting standards and mentoring engineers.
Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and other engineering teams to deliver advanced search and recommendation features.
Ensure robust monitoring and logging with New Relic and ELK, driving reliability and performance.

Requirements

Proven experience as a Software Engineering Lead / Tech Lead / Principal working on search platforms or large-scale distributed systems.
Strong expertise in Java and the Spring Boot ecosystem.
Deep hands-on expertise with Elasticsearch, including index design, relevance tuning, and performance optimization.
Solid background in cloud-native architectures with AWS and Kubernetes (EKS).
Excellent communication and leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring and guiding teams.
An inclusive, positive, collaborative mindset and a desire to deliver real business value to customers

Culture & Benefits

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organization.
Offer numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance, and sabbaticals.
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.
Comprehensive Pension Plan.
Generous vacation entitlement and option for sabbatical leave.
Internal communities and networks.

Principal Software Engineer (Search, AI)