Staff Applied AI Researcher - Agentic Search Architect

Nebius Group; Zürich; On-site; CHF 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth opportunities

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative culture

Impactful AI projects

International environment

Job summary

Nebius is seeking a Staff Applied AI Researcher to join a fast growing team building an agent native search platform—the web access layer for AI systems. You will design retrieval systems optimized for machine consumption and lead ranking research at scale.

Clear ownership, impactful research direction, and collaboration with engineers to ship real-world AI workloads are central. The role requires 8+ years in AI/ML and strong Python/C++ skills.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in applied AI, ML, or software engineering.
• Proven track record shipping ML/AI systems to production.
• Deep experience with search, retrieval, ranking, or assistants.
• Strong understanding of modern deep learning, especially transformers and embeddings.
• Experience with LLM integrated or knowledge intensive systems.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks and metrics for ML systems.
• Strong programming skills in Python and at least one of Go, C++, or similar.
• Ability to operate in a fast moving, product driven environment with high ownership and autonomy.

Responsibilities

• Drive applied research and technical direction across retrieval and ranking systems.
• Design and evolve multi stage retrieval architectures (query understanding, rewriting, reranking, iterative retrieval).
• Develop methods for grounding LLMs in real time web data at scale.
• Define and implement new evaluation paradigms and metrics for agentic systems.
• Lead experimentation on modern retrieval approaches (embeddings, hybrid search, reranking).
• Analyse trade-offs across relevance, latency, and cost at scale.
• Work closely with engineering to deploy systems in high throughput, low latency environments.
• Own ambiguous problems end to end and contribute to product and research direction.
• Mentor engineers and help raise the technical bar of the team.

Skills

Applied AI/ML experience

Python

Deep learning

Transformers

Tools

Go

C++

PyTorch

Job description

Nebius is seeking a Staff Applied AI Researcher to join a fast growing team building an agent native search platform—the web access layer for AI systems. You will design retrieval systems optimized for machine consumption and lead ranking research at scale.

Clear ownership, impactful research direction, and collaboration with engineers to ship real-world AI workloads are central. The role requires 8+ years in AI/ML and strong Python/C++ skills.