Senior Software Engineer, Search
Senior software engineer responsible for advancing a state-of-the-art search and information retrieval platform, improving relevance and latency while collaborating with ML, product, and mission teams. Requires 7+ years of backend development experience and deep expertise in search, NLP, and machine learning.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design and adapt the technical strategy for search across products, including full-text search, vector databases, large language models, natural language processing, and relevance algorithms.
- Improve search latency and relevance.
- Collaborate with product engineers, designers, and mission strategists to translate user needs into data-informed search innovations.
- Research and apply emerging technologies, trends, and best practices in search and information retrieval to improve index quality, freshness, and retrieval performance.
Requirements
- 7+ years of backend software development experience, including 3+ years in search, information retrieval, or related fields.
- Experience architecting, developing, and deploying reliable, scalable, and performant systems.
- Expertise in information retrieval, NLP, and machine learning.
- Deep understanding of indexing, ranking, query parsing, tokenization, and vector search.
- Hands-on experience with at least one major search engine, such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
- Familiarity with search evaluation metrics and frameworks, including precision, recall, and NDCG.
- U.S. Person status required to access U.S.-only data systems.
Compensation and Benefits
- Salary: $150,000–$215,000 per year, plus equity.
- Health, dental, and vision insurance.
- Remote-friendly work environment with WeWork access.
- Unlimited PTO, federal holiday downtime, and company-wide year-end time off.
- 401(k) match.
- Lifestyle and wellbeing stipends.
- Salary top-up during military reserve duty.
- Fully paid parental leave.
- Child and pet care reimbursement during travel.
Skills
Elasticsearch, Opensearch, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Vector Search, Full-Text Search, Search Ranking, Query Parsing, Tokenization, Vector Databases, Ndcg
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