Junior Software Engineer

Shade.inc•New York City, NY

10h•Onsite

About The Position

Shade is scaling rapidly, building critical infrastructure for media teams. We combine existing technologies with proprietary AI search and labeling. Our customers include major companies like Salesforce, A24, and the Boston Celtics. We are experiencing significant growth and have recently closed a $14M Series A funding round. The role focuses on building and owning the AI search layer, addressing unsolved challenges in multi-modal search, data transfer, version control for creatives, and storage layer integration. This is an opportunity to work on real-world problems at scale from day one, contributing to a product that directly impacts customers.

Requirements

0-2 years of full-time engineering experience, or strong internship, research, or project work that shows you can ship production code.
Solid Python fundamentals — comfort reading and writing backend code, not just notebooks.
Some exposure to LLM-powered systems: RAG, embeddings, semantic search — whether through work, coursework, or a side project you’re proud of.
Curiosity about how retrieval systems work and why they fail.
Care about writing quality code and getting better fast.
Experience building side projects that real people use, shipping features in a production codebase, or doing meaningful coursework or research in ML/search.

Nice To Haves

Pre-Series B startup experience is a plus, but not required.

Responsibilities

Grow into owning the search layer on top of the existing foundation.
Work directly alongside the engineering team to learn how production AI search systems are built and operated at scale.
Take on ownership of the search layer as you ramp up.
Work on the indexing and retrieval pipeline, including improving LLM re-ranking, evaluating retrieval quality, and iterating on chunking and embedding strategies.
Make architectural decisions with a focus on cost consequences.
Integrate with customer data sources and information outside of the platform.
Contribute to the Python backend, utilizing pgvector for vector storage.