Principal Data Engineer

Posted:
1/16/2026, 1:36:48 AM

Location(s):
London, England, United Kingdom ⋅ England, United Kingdom

Experience Level(s):
Expert or higher ⋅ Senior

Field(s):
Data & Analytics

                                                Principal Data Engineer
                                 

About the team: 

The Search and AI Platform is Elsevier’s agentic data platform, which powers products such as Scopus, ScienceDirect, and our next-generation LLM-powered research systems.

The platform utilises agentic services to interrogate our rich knowledge graphs, search and recommendation systems, and our unparalleled collection of research data, delivering insights to the scientific community that enable them to collaborate more effectively, work smarter, and produce high-quality research more efficiently.

About the role:   

We are seeking an innovative and passionate principal data engineer to collaborate with our teams in building and enhancing our platform, delivering intelligent and scalable solutions that create real value for our clients.

Key responsibilities: 

  • Designing, prototyping, and building robust and scalable applications, following clean code, secure and best-practice software engineering principles.

  • Working with technologies including Python, Java (Spring Boot), Spark, Airflow, and various database technologies like search, graph, RDBMS and key value stores.

  • Creating data pipelines (ELT and ETL) for bulk data ingestion into various database systems, ensuring scalability, cost and performance optimisation.

  • Working with data engineering and warehousing technologies like Data Lake, Delta Lake, Iceberg and similar standards. 

  • Generating embeddings for ingestion with the latest models at scale.

  • Building cloud infrastructure in AWS to host and monitor the services, automating common tasks.

Requirements:  

  • A passionate engineer with strong commercial software engineering experience delivering server-side applications.

  • Good experience in ETL, Spark, Airflow

  • Experience in Database systems.

  • Excellent programming skills with Java and Python

  • An advocate of best-practices for rapid development of quality software, including clean code, architectural design patterns, CI/CD

  • Comfortable learning new technologies, languages, and tools on the job, to ensure that the product is not left behind in a rapidly evolving ecosystem

  • An inclusive, positive, collaborative mindset and a desire to deliver real business value to our customers

Nice to have -

  • An inclusive, positive, collaborative mindset and a desire to deliver real business value to our customers

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 organization. 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 

  • Home, office, or commuting allowance. 

  • 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.

We are committed to providing a fair and accessible hiring process. If you have a disability or other need that requires accommodation or adjustment, please let us know by completing our Applicant Request Support Form or please contact 1-855-833-5120.

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We are an equal opportunity employer: qualified applicants are considered for and treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship status, disability status, protected veteran status, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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Elsevier

Website: https://elsevier.com/

Headquarter Location: Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

Employee Count: 5001-10000

Year Founded: 1880

IPO Status: Private

Last Funding Type: Private Equity

Industries: Content ⋅ Content Discovery ⋅ Delivery ⋅ Health Care ⋅ Information Services ⋅ Information Technology ⋅ Publishing