Consulting/Principal Software Engineer

About the role

We’re looking for a senior Technical Lead to guide a cross-functional squad through technical direction, delivery, and quality — without line management. This is a hands-on role (~40–50%) combining design, coding and/or test automation with technical leadership and facilitation.

Responsibilities:

• Act as technical lead for squad-owned services/components
• Stay hands-on: design, code, review, debug, automate tests
• Translate product goals into sound technical designs and testable stories
• Shape delivery flow, technical decisions, and quality strategy
• Define and uphold CI/CD quality gates (build, test, security, performance)
• Drive pragmatic testing practices (test pyramid, contract tests, non-functional testing)
• Partner on SLOs, observability, incident response, and continuous improvement
• Mentor engineers through pairing, reviews, and technical discussions

Requirements:

• 5+ years in Software Engineering and/or Quality Engineering
• Experience leading through influence (tech lead, feature lead, guild lead, etc.)
• Strong background in distributed systems, data platforms, or high-throughput applications
• Comfortable working across product, architecture, platform/SRE, and partner teams

Technical experience

• Agile delivery, backlog refinement, and slicing work into thin verticals
• Test strategy, shift-left practices, and CI/CD quality gates
• One or more languages: Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, Python, SQL
• Data modeling and performance tuning
• CI/CD, containers, cloud fundamentals, observability
• Secure coding basics (OWASP), reliability and incident response

Work in a way that works for you

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation. 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:-

• Dutch Share Purchase Plan
• Annual Profit Share Bonus
• 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
• Variety of online training courses and career roadshows
• Wellbeing programs and gym facility in the office
• Internal communities and networks
• Various employee discounts
• Recruitment introduction rewards
• Work from anywhere
• Employee Assistance Program (global)
• Annual Event

About the business

At Elsevier, we help the world of research to make high-value decisions with confidence through a rich portfolio of services and products such as Scopus, Pure, and SciVal. The high-quality connected data and insights that these products provide come from our Research Data Platform (RDP), the data powerhouse of Elsevier’s analytics business. RDP follows Data Mesh principles and is organized in domains, one of which is focusing on identifying and linking topics and concepts found in scientific text.