Senior Software Engineer - External Products

About Silverchair

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. Our global teams build, maintain, and innovate platforms across the publishing lifecycle, facilitating submission, peer review, hosting, dissemination, and impact measurement.

The Silverchair Platform hosts critical research content from such prestigious publishers as Oxford University Press, the American Medical Association, and McGraw Hill, comprising more than 12 million articles and 97k books. ScholarOne Manuscripts is the world's leading scholarly workflow management platform, processing over 3 million manuscripts annually for 9,000+ journal sites and serving 1.1 million monthly active users. ScholarOne Conferences streamlines the academic conference lifecycle for 135+ conferences annually, supporting scholarly publishers and associations worldwide.

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

DEI Statement

At Silverchair, we celebrate and embrace diversity in all its forms. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment from the moment you consider joining our team. We actively encourage candidates from diverse backgrounds to apply, believing that a variety of perspectives and experiences enriches our community, drives innovation, and strengthens our impact.

Equity and inclusion are at the core of our hiring practices, and we strive to build a team that reflects a broad spectrum of cultures, experiences, and viewpoints. We are particularly committed to increasing representation from groups historically underrepresented in technology careers. Your unique experiences and perspectives are not just welcomed but are integral to our collective success. Join us in our mission to create a culture that unites and brings out the best in all of us.

Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion at Silverchair.

Overview

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.

Why Silverchair

Scientific research drives human progress — but only if it can be found, trusted, and used. The systems that connect researchers to knowledge matter enormously.

The platform you'll work on directly enables:

• Research discovery: Tools that help researchers find relevant work faster, surface unexpected connections, and stay current in rapidly evolving fields
• Research integrity: Systems that support rigorous peer review and help maintain trust in the scientific record
• Access and equity: Making scholarly content more accessible and usable for researchers everywhere

We're remote-first, engineering-driven, and committed to building software that lasts. If you want your work to matter beyond the next sprint, we'd like to hear from you.

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

Required Skills

• 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

Desired Experience

• 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

What You'll Bring

• You're a strong engineer first — you've built systems that handle real-world scale and complexity
• You care about the details: clean code, thoughtful architecture, reliable infrastructure
• You've owned software in production and know what it takes to keep it healthy
• You're curious about where AI fits into the products you build, without needing it to be the whole job
• You're energized by mission-driven work and want your engineering to matter
• You thrive in a technology-forward environment that values learning and experimentation

Silverchair is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. We are dedicated to ensuring a fair and inclusive hiring process for all candidates.

We encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds and experiences and are committed to providing reasonable accommodation for qualified individuals with disabilities in the application and hiring process.

Disclaimer: At this time, we cannot sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization for this position.

No agencies please.

Salary Range: $125,000-150,000

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