Technical Lead, Materials AI & Engineering

About the Role

Materials R&D runs on information that is buried in papers, patents, datasheets and specialist terminology. PatSnap’s Materials team is building the data and AI products that make that knowledge searchable, structured and decision-ready for R&D teams.

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.