# Senior Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Search

**Company:** [Ironclad](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/ironclad)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $220k – $270k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** LLMs, Information Retrieval, Elasticsearch, Opensearch, Solr, Vespa, Vector Search, Reranking, Natural Language Processing, Anthropic, OpenAI, GCP, RAG, Sft, Reinforcement Learning
**Posted:** 2026-08-25

> Leads architecture and technical direction for agentic search systems combining LLMs, retrieval, and content-understanding pipelines for contract intelligence. The role requires 10+ years building production systems, deep search or LLM expertise, and strong cross-team technical leadership.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Own the architecture for agentic search systems that combine LLMs and retrieval to answer complex contract questions.
- Design and run benchmarks and experiments to measure search quality and drive continuous improvement.
- Help establish and raise the organization’s search quality standards.
- Build and use NLP/LLM models and pipelines to transform raw documents into data usable by retrieval systems.
- Define architectural decisions and technical direction for engineers across the AI organization.
- Partner with product, applied science, and engineering leaders; mentor senior engineers and drive cross-team technical decisions.

## Requirements
- 10+ years building production systems, with substantial experience in search, information retrieval, content understanding, or recommendation systems at scale.
- Depth in learned or hybrid retrieval, query understanding/NLU pipelines, or production LLM agent systems; ideally experience in multiple areas.
- Production experience with Elasticsearch or equivalent search frameworks, including relevance tuning and reranking.
- Fluency with modern LLM APIs and multi-provider orchestration, including token budgets, tool-calling semantics, and prompt-caching trade-offs.
- Experience with eval-driven workflows, including offline benchmarks, regression detection, and structured A/B comparisons.
- Strong autonomy, ownership, technical leadership, and mentoring skills.
- Ability to operate effectively in a dynamic, fast-paced, outcome-driven environment.

## Nice to Have
- Hands-on experience with post-training algorithms and infrastructure, including SFT and RL.
- Experience with content understanding or information retrieval in structured-document-heavy domains.
- Experience building RAG systems using Google Docs, PDFs, DOCX, and other document formats.

## Compensation & Benefits
- Senior Staff base salary: **$220,000–$270,000 USD**.
- Equity awards and opportunities for additional awards.
- Health, dental, and vision coverage, including dependent coverage options.
- Gender-neutral parental leave, compassionate leave, and paid time off.
- Family-forming support.
- Wellbeing, hybrid-work, and applicable cell-phone stipends.
- Mental health support.
- Pre-tax commuter benefits and a 401(k) plan with employer match.
- Regular team events and career growth opportunities.

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