Software Engineer (Search & AI focus)

Core Functions of the Role:

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs that power customer-facing applications. 
• Build and productionize search/retrieval capabilities (indexing, retrieval, ranking/relevance, evaluation). 
• Collaborate across engineering and product to define requirements, iterate quickly, and deliver reliable releases. 
• Participate in planning, design, development, testing, and deployment using Agile practices. 
• Propose pragmatic solutions and improvements that directly influence product direction. 

Required Qualifications

• 3–7 years of professional software engineering experience building backend or data-heavy systems. 
• Strong backend fundamentals: API design, testing, debugging, performance, and operational thinking. 
• Production experience in Python and at least one of Kotlin/Java (Kotlin preferred). 
• Experience with a modern backend framework (e.g., Spring or equivalent) or demonstrated ability to ramp quickly in one. 
• Search/retrieval experience is required: you’ve built or substantially contributed to a search/retrieval system (indexing pipelines, relevance tuning, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, semantic retrieval, ranking, query parsing/understanding, etc.). 
• Solid understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), data modeling, and query patterns. 
• Comfortable working in a small team with high ownership and ambiguous problems. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch in production (index design, analyzers, query tuning, performance, relevance). 
• Experience with embeddings or vector search and relevance iteration/evaluation. 
• Experience integrating LLMs into production applications. 
• Familiarity with approaches like hybrid search and ranking signals. 
• Go experience (or interest in learning). 
• AWS + containerized deployment experience (Docker, ECS, CI/CD). 
• Understanding of microservices and cross-service communication.