Senior Software Engineer - Data Search

Lever, Inc.; Ireland; Remote; EUR 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Meaningful equity options

Fully remote in Europe

Flexible working hours

Unlimited paid vacation

Personal development support

Job summary

Lever, Inc. seeks a Senior Software Engineer - Data Search based in Ireland. You will own and improve a large-scale creator search system, working across embeddings, ranking, and low-latency serving.

The role blends distributed systems, multimodal data, and LLM-powered features at scale, with autonomy and cross-functional collaboration in a fast-moving, async-first environment. You will design production systems, evaluate new models, and partner with data, product, and leadership teams to

Qualifications

• Experience building large-scale data, backend, or search products where volume and latency matter.
• Ability to take products from concept through architecture, implementation, production release, and iteration.
• Strong distributed systems design experience with reliability and scale considerations.
• Experience with LLM-powered features in production and cost-aware latency tradeoffs.
• Excellent problem-solving and autonomous work style in ambiguous contexts.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience in fast-moving product environments with incremental shipping.

Responsibilities

• Improve creator discovery across hundreds of millions of profiles and media by enhancing retrieval, filtering, ranking, relevance, and latency.
• Design and build systems that generate multimodal embeddings from images, video, text, and audio at scale.
• Develop new search capabilities and take ideas from experimentation to production, balancing quality, latency, and cost.
• Own technical problems end-to-end: gather requirements, design solutions, write code, launch features, measure outcomes.
• Diagnose and resolve relevance and performance issues across data, query logic, and models.
• Evaluate new models and technologies and identify meaningful improvements to the search experience.
• Collaborate with data and product teams to introduce new datasets and search capabilities while ensuring data quality.
• Contribute to technical direction and architecture while keeping production services reliable and maintainable.
• Share findings and best practices to promote strong engineering norms.

Skills

Distributed systems

LLM-powered features

Python

TypeScript

Node.js

Cloud AWS/GCP

Vector databases

Elasticsearch

Data pipelines

Search/data retrieval

Tools

Milvus

PySpark

Airflow

SageMaker

DynamoDB

Kinesis

Lambda

Pulumi

Aurora

Job description

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Software Engineer - Data Search based in Ireland.

This is a senior engineering role focused on building and improving a large-scale creator search experience used by thousands of businesses worldwide. You'll work across the full search stack, from data and indexing pipelines to retrieval, embeddings, ranking, relevance, and low-latency serving. The role combines distributed systems, multimodal data, vector search, and LLM-powered technologies to solve complex search problems at significant scale. You'll work with hundreds of millions of profiles and billions of media files, turning messy, high-volume data into useful intelligence. You'll have substantial autonomy and ownership, taking ambiguous product challenges from discovery through architecture, implementation, production, and measurement. You'll collaborate closely with data, product, engineering, customers, and leadership teams in a fast-moving, async-first environment.

Accountabilities:

• Improve creator discovery across hundreds of millions of profiles and billions of media files by enhancing retrieval, filtering, ranking, relevance, performance, and the overall search experience.

• Design and build systems that generate and leverage multimodal embeddings from images, video, text, and audio at large scale.

• Develop new search capabilities and take promising ideas from experimentation to reliable production systems, balancing search quality, latency, scalability, and cost.

• Own technical problems end to end, including understanding customer needs, gathering requirements, defining solutions, designing architecture, writing code, launching features, measuring outcomes, and iterating based on evidence.

• Diagnose and resolve relevance and performance issues across data, query logic, retrieval, ranking, models, and product decisions.

• Evaluate new models and technologies pragmatically, understanding their tradeoffs and identifying where they can create meaningful improvements to the search experience.

• Work closely with data and product teams to introduce new datasets, datapoints, and search capabilities while ensuring appropriate coverage and data quality.

• Contribute to technical direction and system architecture while maintaining reliable, scalable, and maintainable production services.

• Share findings, technical insights, and learnings with colleagues and contribute to a culture of strong engineering practices and continuous improvement.

Requirements:

• Proven experience building large-scale data, backend, or search-oriented products where volume, latency, reliability, scalability, and cost are important considerations.

• Demonstrated ability to take products or substantial technical initiatives from concept through architecture, implementation, production release, measurement, and iteration.

• Strong experience designing and working with distributed systems, including understanding throughput, data flows, scalability, failure modes, reliability, and operational tradeoffs.

• Professional experience building LLM-powered or agentic features in production, with a practical understanding of model capabilities, limitations, latency, and cost.

• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work autonomously on ambiguous problems, gather missing context, ask effective questions, and turn uncertainty into action.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience working in fast-moving product environments where teams ship incrementally, learn from data, and adapt quickly to changing priorities.

• Strong programming skills and comfort working with technologies such as Python, TypeScript, or Node.js.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure and modern data platforms is highly valuable, particularly AWS or GCP.

• Experience with technologies such as Elasticsearch, vector databases, distributed data processing, data orchestration, or infrastructure as code is advantageous.

• Bonus experience includes multimodal embeddings, semantic search, ranking algorithms, model deployment, self-hosted models, GPU infrastructure, or vector search technologies.

• Curiosity about creator platforms, social media, or the creator economy is welcome, although prior industry experience is not required.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation: Annual salary range of €100,000-€130,000, plus stock options. The exact package depends on location, employment type, skills, and experience.

• Meaningful equity: A significant stock option package designed to provide employees with meaningful ownership as the organization grows.

• Fully remote in Europe: Work remotely from wherever you do your best work, with some working-hour overlap around GMT+3.

• Flexible working hours: Focus is placed on outcomes and impact rather than fixed login times.

• Unlimited paid vacation: Take the time you need to rest and recharge.

• Personal development support: Access funding for courses, books, conferences, and other opportunities that support your professional growth.

• Real technical ownership: Take challenging search and engineering problems from initial idea through production without unnecessary layers of process.

• Regular company offsites: Connect with colleagues in person through recurring offsites while maintaining a remote-first working model.

• Deep-work culture: Purposeful meetings, focused collaboration, and protected time for designing, building, optimizing, and launching.

• Fast-moving environment: Work alongside experienced engineers and specialists while having the autonomy to make meaningful technical decisions.

• Modern technology stack: Work with technologies including AWS, GCP, Pulumi, Python, TypeScript, Node.js, PySpark, Airflow, Milvus/Zilliz, Elasticsearch, Apache Iceberg, SageMaker, DynamoDB, S3, Glue, Kinesis, Lambda, ECS, and Aurora.

• Efficient hiring process: The interview process is designed to move quickly and can be completed in under a week, typically including an introductory conversation, coding interview, system design interview, team interview, and a final culture and alignment conversation.