Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

Details

• 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 user and agentic consumers
• Optimize latency, throughput and cost across large-scale inference and retrieval workloads
• Drive technical direction for reliability and security
• Architectural Depth: You have a proven track record (typically 6+ years) of shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems. You don’t just write code; you design for high throughput, low latency, and long-term maintainability.
• Data Engineering Savvy: You’re comfortable building high-throughput indexing pipelines that handle both the messy world of unstructured data and the rigid world of structured schemas.
• Retrieval Intuition: You understand that "search" is more than just a keyword match. You have direct experience (or deep theoretical knowledge) in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval strategies, or with traditional search engines like Elastic or OpenSearch.
• RAG & Orchestration: You understand the nuances of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, from embedding pipelines and hybrid search techniques to how query planning and metadata filtering can make or break an LLM's performance.
• Language Fluency: You are an expert in at least one major language like Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python.
• Infrastructure: Familiarity and experience with modern infrastructure tools, such as Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, and observability frameworks, as well as infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Pulumi.
• Product Thinking: You don't just build to spec; you build for the user. You can design clean, intuitive APIs that both human developers and autonomous agents will love.
• Ambiguity Navigator: You’re comfortable in a high-growth environment. You prefer "owning a problem" over "executing a ticket."
• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Experience with retrieval evaluation frameworks—knowing how to actually measure "good" search results.
• Experience with query planning or agentic reasoning loops (e.g., teaching a system how to break down a complex prompt into multiple specific steps).