# Staff Software Engineer, Search Systems - Code Data

**Company:** [Mercor](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/mercor)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $250k – $500k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Python, Dense Embeddings, Bm25, Tf-Idf, Hybrid Retrieval, Re-Ranking, Hnsw, Ivf, Product Quantization, Elasticsearch, Opensearch, Lucene, Faiss, Distributed Systems, RAG
**Posted:** 2026-08-14

> Owns the architecture and implementation of large-scale code search and retrieval systems, including hybrid ranking, indexing, model routing, and quality evaluation. The role requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, deep search expertise, and Staff-level technical leadership.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Own the architecture of code search and retrieval systems end to end, including hybrid retrieval with dense code embeddings and BM25, candidate generation, ranking, and re-ranking.
- Identify similar code tasks based on code structure, semantics, intent, and difficulty.
- Build systems that select code-specific models and route tasks to the right model.
- Design natural-language-to-query translation for precise search over code and tasks.
- Design and operate indexing pipelines supporting continuous task, solution, and result ingestion.
- Balance incremental updates, full rebuilds, and real-time ingestion.
- Optimize search speed and cost through embedding dimensionality, quantization, ANN index selection, caching, sharding, and serving infrastructure.
- Build evaluation harnesses for evolving embeddings, models, and search quality, including re-embedding, A/B testing, and regression prevention.
- Define technical strategy for code retrieval and lead high-stakes design reviews.
- Establish offline and online evaluation metrics and quality guardrails.
- Prototype critical systems, ship production code, and resolve difficult retrieval and infrastructure problems.
- Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, and technical writing.
- Partner with product, research, and engineering leadership on platform investments, build-versus-buy decisions, and technical hiring.

## Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years at Senior level or above, with a Staff-level record of organization-wide technical impact.
- Hands-on expertise building search and retrieval systems using dense-embedding retrieval, lexical scoring, hybrid ranking, and re-ranking.
- Strong understanding of search algorithms and index internals, including vector/ANN indices, inverted indices, and search engines or vector databases.
- Experience with HNSW, IVF, product quantization, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Lucene, FAISS, or vector databases.
- Experience making cost-versus-speed tradeoffs for high-QPS systems, including latency, throughput, memory, and infrastructure spend.
- Familiarity with translating natural-language questions into structured search queries through query understanding, semantic parsing, or LLM-assisted query generation.
- Excellent distributed-systems, data-modeling, and API-design fundamentals.
- Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship.
- Fluency with modern AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot.
- Excellent communication, ownership, pragmatism, and execution skills.

## Nice to Have
- Experience with code search, code understanding, code embeddings, or code-specific models.
- Experience training or fine-tuning code-embedding models or code-specific LLMs.
- Experience with learning-to-rank, semantic search, or recommendation systems in production.
- Familiarity with LLM-based retrieval, RAG patterns, and model routing or selection.
- Experience operating latency-critical services on cloud and orchestration infrastructure.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Salary: $250,000–$500,000 per year.
- Generous equity grant vested over four years.
- Up to $15,000 relocation bonus when moving to the Bay Area.
- $10,000 housing bonus for living within 0.5 miles of the office.
- $1,500 monthly meal stipend.
- Free Equinox membership.
- Health insurance.

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