Staff Applied AI Researcher (Agentic Search)

Tavily; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Tavily is seeking a Staff Applied AI Researcher to help build an agent-native search platform, a web-access layer for AI systems. You’ll design and own parts of the search stack, focusing on ranking or iterative retrieval in the first year.

You will push forward state-of-the-art retrieval, grounding LLMs in real-time web data, and define evaluation metrics for agentic systems while guiding teams toward scalable, low-latency production solutions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in applied AI, ML, or software engineering.
• Proven track record of shipping ML or AI systems to production at scale.
• Deep experience with search, retrieval, ranking or building RAG-based 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.
• Top-tier publications (ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, EMNLP, ACL).
• 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, retrieval, reranking and iterative retrieval).
• Lead experimentation on modern retrieval approaches (embedding research, sparse and hybrid retrieval, reranking, context compression) and bring them into production.
• Develop methods for grounding LLMs in real-time web data at scale, using trust, quality and freshness signals to surface reliable sources.
• Partner with the evaluation team to define new metrics for agentic systems, where correctness is not reducible to clicks.
• Analyze trade-offs across relevance, latency, and cost, and work closely with engineering to deploy systems that operate at web scale.
• Mentor researchers and engineers and help raise the technical bar of the team.

Skills

Applied AI

Search systems

Python

LLMs

RAG-based

Transformers

Job description

We are 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 can think of this as Google search, but for AI agents: a system designed for machines, not humans. We are building agentic search, where AI systems actively plan, retrieve, evaluate, and refine information rather than simply returning results. As AI becomes the primary interface to the web, this layer will replace the role of traditional search engines.

We are designing these systems to search and reason over web data in real time, under strict latency and reliability constraints. This means solving retrieval, ranking and passage extraction under entirely new access patterns and at significant scale, with systems operating over constantly changing, unstructured data and serving tens of thousands of production workloads 24/7.

This role comes with ownership over key parts of our applied AI research direction and system design, with a strong expectation of defining new approaches and shipping measurable impact in production. In the first year, you will own a specific part of the search stack, e.g. ranking or iterative retrieval.

What you’ll work on:

• Designing an agent-native search system that handles everything from low-latency single-hop search to complex deep search tasks requiring iterative planning, querying, refinement and reasoning.
• Training ranking and retrieval models optimized for agent-driven workflows under real world constraints
• Bringing the latest advances from the research community to our search stack and ship it to production.

Your responsibilities:

• Drive applied research and technical direction across retrieval and ranking systems
• Design and evolve multi-stage retrieval architectures (query understanding, rewriting, retrieval, reranking and iterative retrieval)
• Lead experimentation on modern retrieval approaches (embedding research, sparse and hybrid retrieval, reranking, context compression) and bring them into production
• Develop methods for grounding LLMs in real-time web data at scale, using trust, quality and freshness signals to surface reliable sources
• Partner with the evaluation team to define new metrics for agentic systems, where correctness is not reducible to clicks
• Analyze trade-offs across relevance, latency, and cost, and work closely with engineering to deploy systems that operate at web scale
• Mentor researchers and engineers and help raise the technical bar of the team

Must haves:

• 8+ years of experience in applied AI, ML, or software engineering
• Proven track record of shipping ML or AI systems to production at scale
• Deep experience with search, retrieval, ranking or building RAG-based 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
• Top-tier publications (ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, EMNLP, ACL)
• Ability to operate in a fast-moving, product-driven environment with high ownership and autonomy

Nice to haves

• Background in agentic AI systems (agents, tool use, autonomous workflows)
• Experience with RL post-training of LLMs or VLMs