Patent Analytics Expert (IP & Portfolio Analysis Products) in Cardiff

Do you want your patent analytics expertise to shape the products and AI that others rely on? Do you revel in testing a polished AI answer and finding exactly where its reasoning breaks down? Come join us and help build the world's most trusted patent analytics and AI for IP and business decision-makers!

About the team:

LexisNexis Intellectual Property, part of RELX, helps the world's innovators, IP professionals, law firms, and investors understand patents: their own, their competitors', and those of the companies they are assessing. Our products, including PatentSight+, IPlytics and TotalPatent One, and the patent data we deliver directly into customers' own systems, inform decisions on R&D investment, licensing, litigation, M&A and competitive strategy.

Many of our customers use patents to make business decisions: comparing their portfolio with competitors', spotting acquisition or licensing targets, deciding what to keep or drop, or tracking where a technology is heading. Increasingly, they ask an AI assistant to help. We're looking for someone who knows what good answers to these questions look like, to help make sure our products, and the AI inside them, give them.

About the role:

Answering questions like these well takes judgment: which companies to group together, how to count, which time window to use, how to read a claim, and what the numbers can and cannot support. AI can now produce a polished answer in seconds, which makes that judgment more important, because a convincing answer can still be a wrong one.

In this role, you will represent the people who ask these questions, and you will be forward deployed: working closely with the product and engineering teams building specific end-user experiences, rather than advising from a distance. You will define what a genuinely useful answer looks like across different use cases, contexts, and data scenarios, and encode that judgment in artefacts and other mechanisms, including AI agents, so it can scale. You will test our analytics and AI against it and help shape what we build next.

Key Responsibilities:

• Be the voice, alongside the product and engineering teams building our end-user experiences, of the various types of end users who use patent analytics for business decisions: IP and portfolio managers, competitive-intelligence analysts, corporate development and M&A teams, R&D strategists and investors, by deeply understanding their needs, aspirations and the jobs they need to get done.
• Define what good looks like across a broad range of AI-assisted uses, such as portfolio exploration and comparison, competitor benchmarking, technology and sector trends, acquisition and licensing target identification, portfolio optimisation, and patent summaries and claim interpretation.
• Capture that definition in governed, versioned question sets, graded example answers, scoring rubrics, and acceptance criteria that teams build closed-loop evaluations on, and work closely with engineering teams to guide them as they build evaluation frameworks on these.
• Perform structured human-in-the-loop evaluations and drive the eyes-on evaluation layer for our AI assistant and analytics features: design and carry out expert reviews, judge whether results meet the bar, and feed what you learn back into the standards.
• Collaborate closely with other patent experts in the team to develop methods that scale eyes-on human evaluation.
• Help engineering teams troubleshoot issues by working backwards from AI outputs to the underlying data sources, to identify root causes.
• Help shape new AI use cases and features: spot questions customers cannot easily answer today, and test ideas with customers and our user research colleagues.
• Scope and lead your own projects independently, from defining the problem to sharing recommendations with senior stakeholders.
• Track how competitors and new AI tools serve these users, and flag opportunities and risks.
• Help capture your judgment in tools and AI assistants that let others apply it at scale and evaluate those tools over time to detect drift and develop ways to recalibrate them.

Requirements:

• Experience using patent data to answer business questions, for example in patent analytics, IP or innovation consulting, competitive intelligence, portfolio management, IP due diligence, or technology scouting.
• A strong technical background, enough to read patents critically and interpret what their claims cover.
• A solid understanding of patent data and its pitfalls for analysis, such as family counting, ownership roll-ups, legal status, citations, classification, and time effects.
• The ability to explain clearly why an analysis is or is not trustworthy, and what would make it better.
• Hands-on analytical skills, for example with analytics platforms, Excel, SQL, or Python.
• Practical use of AI tools in your own analytical work beyond basic chat, including effective prompting, and a clear view of where they help and where they mislead.
• Confidence working independently and presenting recommendations to senior, non-specialist audiences.
• Curiosity about technology, industries and how decision-makers actually use what you give them.

Experience and education:

• Typically, 3 or more years in patent analytics, competitive intelligence, IP consulting, portfolio management, or related roles; we will also consider candidates earlier in their careers who show strong promise.
• A degree in a scientific, engineering, or technical subject, or equivalent practical experience; a further degree is a plus.

It would be great if you also have:

• Hands-on experience with patent analytics platforms.
• Experience with AI evaluation, for example rubric-based scoring, LLM-as-a-judge, or human-in-the-loop review.
• Experience with M&A, IP due diligence, licensing, or portfolio valuation.
• Experience with prior-art or freedom-to-operate work.
• A background in a technology-intensive industry or R&D.
• Experience working with product teams or user researchers.

You do not need to have worked for a data or software company before. We will help you learn how our products are built; you bring the analytical judgment and the customer's perspective.

This role is probably not for you if you'd rather produce analyses for clients than shape the products and AI that produce them, or if you're not keen to use AI tools in your work.

Why Join Us?

You'll help decide what good patent-based insight looks like for many different kinds of users worldwide, with the backing of a global group that has been building data, analytics and AI products for many years, and with colleagues who care about getting answers right.

In your application

Please tell us briefly about one of the following:

• A time a patent-based analysis of a portfolio, competitor or technology, whether your own, a colleague's or AI-generated, gave a misleading picture: how you noticed, and what you would change in the method or the tool so it doesn't happen again.
• A patent-based analysis you did that influenced a business decision, such as an R&D, acquisition, licensing or competitive-strategy choice: the question, your approach, and how you knew your answer could be trusted. What AI tools and workflows would you use if you were doing it today?

Work in a way that works for you

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

• Generous holiday allowance with the option to buy additional days.
• Health screening, eye care vouchers, and private medical benefits.
• Wellbeing programs.
• Life assurance.
• Access to a competitive contributory pension scheme.
• Save As You Earn share option scheme.
• Maternity, paternity, and shared parental leave.
• Employee Assistance Programme.
• Access to employee resource groups with dedicated time to volunteer.
• Access to extensive learning and development resources.
• Access to employee discounts scheme via Perks at Work.

About the business

At LexisNexis Intellectual Property (LNIP), we believe that whenever a person works on a patent and understands the future trajectory of a specific technology, that person has the potential to fundamentally change how society operates. We are proud to directly support and serve these innovators in their endeavors to better humankind. We enable innovators to accomplish more by helping them make informed decisions, be more productive, comply with regulations, and ultimately achieve superior results. By harnessing the latest advances in machine learning combined with expert analysis, LexisNexis Intellectual Property is disrupting how actionable insight is extracted from patent data. Information can now be accessed with efficiency, accuracy and at a speed that is just not possible by traditional methods. Our overall success is measured by how well we deliver these results.