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RELX

Director, Search & AI Evaluation

RELX

Director leading strategy and innovation in Search & AI Evaluation for Elsevier. Overseeing data science teams to improve search relevance and AI quality systems.

Posted 5/24/2026full-timeLondon • 🇬🇧 United KingdomLeadWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies
PythonPyTorch

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact
  • Define and drive the long-term strategy for search relevance, retrieval evaluation, ranking optimization, and AI system quality.
  • Lead initiatives focused on improving:
  • Search relevance and ranking quality.
  • Semantic retrieval and vector search
  • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
  • AI grounding and hallucination mitigation
  • User discovery and engagement outcomes
  • Establish scalable evaluation methodologies for search, retrieval, recommendation, and LLM-powered systems.
  • Guide experimentation and optimization across lexical, semantic, hybrid, and AI-assisted retrieval architectures.
  • Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to align search and AI investments with customer and business priorities.
  • Influence technical direction for retrieval systems, evaluation infrastructure, and AI quality frameworks across platforms.
  • Define and operationalize evaluation frameworks for search and generative AI systems.
  • Build scalable processes for benchmark creation, annotation quality, evaluation governance, and performance reporting.
  • Drive rigorous, evidence-based decision-making across AI and search initiatives.
  • Champion responsible AI practices focused on quality, reliability, trust, and measurable user impact.
  • Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of Data Scientists and Analysts.

Requirements

What you’ll need
  • Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Statistics, NLP, or a related quantitative field.
  • 10+ years of experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Search Relevance, Evaluation Systems, or Applied AI.
  • Significant experience leading and scaling high-performing technical teams in complex, cross-functional organizations.
  • Deep expertise in:
  • Search relevance and ranking systems.
  • Information retrieval and semantic search
  • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
  • Evaluation methodologies for IR and generative AI systems
  • Experimentation frameworks and A/B testing
  • Strong experience with:
  • Vector retrieval and hybrid search architectures.
  • LLM evaluation and AI quality measurement
  • Embeddings, reranking, and retrieval orchestration
  • Evaluation datasets, benchmarking, and annotation workflows
  • Advanced programming skills in Python.
  • Experience with modern AI/ML frameworks and tooling (e.g., PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain, LangGraph, Haystack).
  • Experience working with large-scale datasets, distributed data/ML platforms, and production AI systems.
  • Strong understanding of statistical analysis, experimentation design, and evaluation science.
  • Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, including experience influencing senior leadership.
  • Demonstrated ability to balance strategic leadership with pragmatic execution in rapidly evolving AI environments.

Benefits

Comp & perks
  • 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)

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools
search relevanceranking optimizationsemantic retrievalvector searchretrieval-augmented generationevaluation methodologiesA/B testingstatistical analysisPythoninformation retrieval
Soft Skills
leadershipmentoringcommunicationstakeholder managementstrategic thinkingdecision-makingteam buildinginfluencingcollaborationexecution