[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer @Silverchair

Role Description

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build the next generation of tools for researchers and publishers. You'll work on external-facing products that serve scholarly content at scale — the search, discovery, and peer review systems that thousands of researchers depend on every day.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll design and build the backend services, data pipelines, and search infrastructure that need to be fast, reliable, and correct. Some of what we're building leans on AI and machine learning, and you'll have room to work on that if it interests you — but we're hiring for engineering fundamentals first.

Essential Functions:

• 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

Qualifications

• 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

Requirements

• 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

Benefits

• Remote-first work environment
• Opportunity to work on mission-driven projects
• Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion

Company Description

Silverchair is the premier independent platform partner for scholarly and professional publishers, dedicated to expanding the reach of the world’s most valuable knowledge. By connecting creators, publishers, and users, we amplify the impact of scholarship and enhance the accessibility of critical information.

Silverchair is a remote-first organization with Silverchairians living and working in over ten countries supporting our clients and operations throughout the globe.