Engineering lead

We're looking for a hands-on engineering leader to own our technical roadmap, strengthen our data and search foundations, and build the engineering team behind them.

What you'll own

• Technical strategy and roadmap: Assess existing systems, identify architectural gaps and define a coherent technical roadmap across data, search and AI. Prioritise investments and make decisions about what to improve, simplify, replace or rebuild.
• Data and search engineering: Structure and drive work across ingestion, parsing, normalisation, knowledge modelling, indexing and retrieval. Establish clear ownership, milestones and measurable standards for data quality, coverage, freshness and search relevance.
• Engineering organisation: Build, grow and manage a multidisciplinary team spanning data, AI and software engineering. Own hiring, performance management and career development. Establish effective ways of working and develop technical leaders.
• Production excellence: Set engineering standards for system design, testing, deployment and observability. Drive improvements in reliability, performance and cost, including the evaluation and productionisation of AI applications.
• Product collaboration: Partner with product managers and materials experts to translate customer and functional problems into technical plans, engineering priorities and measurable outcomes.

What you bring

• Proven engineering management: Experience directly managing engineers through multiple cycles of team building, hiring, growth and organisational development, including coaching and performance management.
• Technical roadmap ownership: A track record independently defining and executing technical roadmaps for complex, data-intensive products or platforms, from diagnosing problems and evaluating approaches through to delivery.
• Data and search expertise: Substantial experience building or leading production data platforms, pipelines, search or retrieval systems, with a strong understanding of data quality, indexing and relevance.
• Strong engineering fundamentals: Sound architectural judgement across backend services, databases, distributed systems and APIs, with practical experience operating reliable production systems.
• Hands-on technical credibility: Strong production engineering experience in backend, data or search systems, with proficiency in relevant languages such as Java, Go, Scala, Python, Rust or C++. Comfortable reviewing architecture and code, challenging technical decisions and resolving complex engineering problems.
• Product-oriented leadership: Able to turn ambiguous requirements into actionable engineering plans, make pragmatic trade-offs and communicate clearly across disciplines.

Nice to have

• Search relevance, hybrid retrieval, RAG and LLM-powered applications.
• Document intelligence, OCR and structured information extraction.
• Ontologies, entity resolution and knowledge graphs.
• Scientific or technical data experience, particularly materials science, chemistry or patents.