Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable platform components leveraging advanced retrieval via query planning, semantic and hybrid search, metadata-aware search, and LLM generation.
• Design and build optimized indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data.
• Build backend services for semantic and hybrid retrieval, knowledge graph construction, and retrieval orchestration.
• Improve retrieval quality through evaluation and observability frameworks.
• Design APIs for internal and external users and agentic consumers.
• Optimize latency, throughput, and cost across large-scale inference and retrieval workloads.
• Drive technical direction for reliability and security.

Requirements

• Typically 6+ years of experience shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems.
• Proven architectural depth designing for high throughput, low latency, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience building high-throughput indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data.
• Experience or deep theoretical knowledge in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval strategies, or traditional search engines such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
• Understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), embedding pipelines, hybrid search, query planning, and metadata filtering.
• Expert in at least one major programming language such as Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, observability frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi.
• Ability to design clean, intuitive APIs for human developers and autonomous agents.
• Comfortable owning problems in a high-growth environment.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Experience with retrieval evaluation frameworks.
• Experience with query planning or agentic reasoning loops.

Compensation and Benefits

• Annual salary range of $190,000–$270,000.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and mental health coverage.
• 401(k) plan.
• Equity award.
• Flexible time off.
• Paid parental leave.
• Annual company retreat.
• Work-from-home equipment stipend.