Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure
About The Position
We are hiring a senior/staff software engineer to help design and build core components of our next-generation knowledge retrieval system built for the AI era – search and retrieval infrastructure that powers high-quality, scalable, and enterprise-grade agentic systems. You’ll build the framework that allows our customers to connect knowledge–synthesized from structured and unstructured data–to modern LLM-powered applications, leveraging the world’s best-in-class vector DB supporting semantic search and hybrid retrieval. This role is ideal for someone who loves backend system architecture, distributed systems, and applied AI infrastructure. It is a high impact role with significant ownership across architecture, performance, and system reliability.
Requirements
- Proven track record (typically 6+ years) of shipping production-grade backends for large-scale systems.
- Comfortable building high-throughput indexing pipelines that handle both the messy world of unstructured data and the rigid world of structured schemas.
- Direct experience (or deep theoretical knowledge) in semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval strategies, or with traditional search engines like Elastic or OpenSearch.
- Understanding of 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.
- Expert in at least one major language like Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python.
- 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.
- Ability to design clean, intuitive APIs that both human developers and autonomous agents will love.
- Comfortable in a high-growth environment. Prefer 'owning a problem' over 'executing a ticket'.
Nice To Haves
- 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).
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 user and agentic consumers
- Optimize latency, throughput and cost across large-scale inference and retrieval workloads
- Drive technical direction for reliability and security
Benefits
- Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources
- 401(k) Plan
- Equity award
- Flexible time off
- Paid parental leave
- Annual Company Retreat
- WFH Equipment Stipend
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
