Vannevar Labs supports people on the front lines by building tools that deter and de-escalate conflict with America's adversaries. We build software and hardware for this mission that enable our customers to maintain maritime vigilance, disrupt misinformation, and collect non-traditional intelligence. In strategic competition, the intelligence and actions that shape conflict occur well before war itself. We build tools to win this fight now.
This mission has become urgent. The US and our allies are fighting a war of deterrence with woefully outdated technology. As a team, we believe in public service and that our democracy and government improve only if we put serious, collective effort into improving them, including the technology our government uses.
Since our founding in 2019, we have grown to support a wide range of missions and capabilities across all U.S. service branches, multiple combatant commands, partner nations, and the intelligence community. We have been profitable since 2021, and are backed by investors including General Catalyst, DFJ Growth, Point72, Costanoa, and Felicis.
Senior Search Engineer
Search is at the heart of Vannevar’s flagship product, Decrypt, and the number of business-critical use cases is growing as we expand into new products. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer, with substantial knowledge and passion for search & information retrieval, to drive innovation in this space. In this role, you will work directly with our ML team to advance a state-of-the-art search system that fundamentally drives our users’ ability to surface mission critical information.
What You’ll Do
- Help craft a technical strategy for search at Vannevar, including how we leverage full-text search, vector databases, LLMs, NLP, and relevance algorithms
- Improve both search latency and relevance
- Partner with other engineers, product managers, and designers to identify and quickly deliver customer value
- Stay up to date with emerging technologies, trends, and best practices; particularly within the search/information retrieval domain
Qualifications
- Proven experience in software development – you have worked on business-critical systems that are deployed in production environments
- You’ve successfully led the design or architecture of new and existing system(s), ideally within the search/information-retrieval domain
- You have proficiency and experience working with search technologies, such as Lucene, Elasticsearch, Vector Databases, NLP and LLMs
- Strong leadership, teamwork, and communication skills
- U.S. Person status is required as this position will require the ability to access U.S. only data systems
What we offer
The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $215,000 + equity + 401K match. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, relevant education, and/or training.
We’re proud to offer competitive benefits that support our employees. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- 100% remote first culture. You can work from anywhere in the US and all full time employees have WeWork access
- Unlimited PTO including competitive vacation and holiday schedules
- Lifestyle stipends - Monthly mental health, wellness & fitness stipend, in-home office setup stipend and family planning assistance
- Salary top-up during military reserve duty
- Fully paid parental leave
- Child and pet care reimbursement during travel
Vannevar Labs is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.
We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, even if you don't feel like you're a perfect fit. If you're passionate about contributing to our mission, we'd love to hear from you!
IMPORTANT NOTICE
We are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @vannevarlabs.com domain. Under no circumstances will a legitimate representative from our company contact you to request passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data. Please be vigilant of potential scams.
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What We Do
Vannevar combines Silicon Valley innovation with former special operators to build AI for real-world national security outcomes. Since our founding in 2019, Vannevar has deployed its technology across 125 missions, safeguarding our service members and improving our country's deterrence. We believe our military service members and intelligence officers deserve access to the best technology American innovation can offer, and we are mobilizing frontier technology for this mission. Our founders have 30 years of combined experience across AI labs, national security strategy, intelligence agencies and special operations. We're supported by a number of leading VCs, including Felicis, DFJ Growth, Point72, Costanoa, and General Catalyst. Vannevar is one of the most capital efficient defense tech companies, reaching early profitability and becoming a defense tech unicorn in 2024.
Why Work With Us
We pride ourselves on being a team of passionate, low-ego professionals who share a commitment to engineering excellence and a genuine concern for the people and AI agents we deliver. Vannevar is a company that truly cares about its people and one of our core principles is "put your wellbeing first".
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We are distributed across the map, but united by the mission. We go where the mission takes us and deliver where others can’t. Honolulu, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington D.C., New York. You decide what's next.
