Jobs at Vespa.ai

Evaluate emerging AI models and retrieval techniques, integrate them with Vespa, and build production-grade reference applications, benchmarks, and demonstrations. The role involves working with embeddings, LLMs, rerankers, search, recommendation, and inference systems; prototyping platform improvements; advising customers; and contributing technical content. It requires strong Python or Java development, practical modern AI/ML expertise, production inference experience, and clear technical communication.

Serve as the primary technical partner for major customers using Vespa. Design search architectures, schemas, ranking, query processing, and cluster topology; plan capacity; benchmark and tune performance; support proofs of concept, migrations, and production troubleshooting. Collaborate with customer engineering teams and Vespa engineers, communicate product needs, and contribute to documentation and technical content. The role involves large-scale distributed systems, AI search, vector databases, and some customer travel.

Operate and improve globally distributed Vespa Cloud production systems. Responsibilities include reliability engineering, incident response, blameless postmortems, automation, observability, SLO/SLI tracking, proactive alerting, capacity planning, remediation, and collaboration on scalable, operable features. The role participates in a 24x7 on-call rotation and focuses on solving operational problems through code across a multi-cloud environment.

Develop and maintain Java components for Vespa’s open-source AI search platform, including the jdisc application container, runtime, APIs, configuration system, and component framework. Improve performance, JVM efficiency, scalability, and robustness; collaborate across Java, C++, and Vespa Cloud teams; review code; write tests and documentation; engage with the open-source community; and resolve complex production issues.

Develop and maintain Java services for Vespa Cloud and the Vespa Kubernetes Operator. Responsibilities include deployment orchestration, autoscaling, access management, monitoring, billing, cloud and Kubernetes API integrations, automated testing, CI/CD, reliability improvements, and customer issue resolution. Collaborate with SRE and platform engineers to deliver scalable, secure, self-service infrastructure for AI search applications.

Summer interns develop and release open-source software for Vespa.ai, focusing on machine learning, search and recommendation, performance optimization, user interfaces, LLM applications, APIs, and large-scale system operations. Projects may involve C++, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, Python, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, vector search, and automated testing. Candidates must be Computer Science or similar students with experience in at least one listed programming language.

Drive full sales cycle for enterprise accounts in Northern California or the Pacific Northwest: prospect, qualify, demo, negotiate, close, and expand deals. Engage technical and executive stakeholders, work with solution engineering, maintain pipeline and forecasts, and help open-source Vespa users evaluate and adopt Vespa Cloud.

The Principal Site Reliability Engineer will maintain reliability of Vespa Cloud systems, lead incident responses, define SLOs, and improve SRE practices. They will work in an environment that emphasizes automation and collaboration, participating in on-call rotations.