Staff Applied AI Researcher: Agentic Search & Retrieval

Jobgether; Netherlands; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Career growth

Autonomy

Impactful projects

Collaborative environment

International team

Diversity & inclusion

Job summary

Partner Company in the Netherlands seeks a Staff/Principal Applied AI Researcher (Agentic Search) to lead research on agent-native retrieval, grounding, and multi-step workflows, delivering scalable AI systems. You will shape evaluation methods beyond traditional metrics and collaborate with engineering and product teams to translate research into production impact.

The role requires deep expertise in search, embeddings, and modern deep learning, with a track record of shipping production ML

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in applied AI, machine learning, or software engineering.
• Proven track record of deploying ML or AI systems at scale.
• Deep expertise in search, information retrieval, ranking, or related domains.
• Strong understanding of modern deep learning, particularly transformer architectures and embeddings.
• Experience building LLM-integrated, knowledge-intensive, or retrieval-augmented systems.
• Experience with evaluation frameworks and meaningful metrics for ML/AI systems.
• Strong Python and at least one systems language such as Go or C++.
• Ability to operate in a fast-moving, product-oriented environment with ownership and autonomy.
• Background in agentic AI or multi-step reasoning is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Drive applied AI research and technical direction across retrieval and ranking systems for agent-native search.
• Design and evolve multi-stage retrieval architectures, including query understanding, query rewriting, reranking, and iterative retrieval.
• Develop grounding approaches for LLMs with real-time web data while maintaining quality and reliability.
• Build systems where LLMs can plan, query, evaluate, and reason over retrieved information across multi-step workflows.
• Define new evaluation frameworks, metrics, and experimentation methodologies for agentic systems beyond traditional metrics.
• Lead experimentation with embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, and related approaches, and transition successful methods into production.
• Analyze and manage trade-offs between relevance, latency, reliability, and infrastructure cost at scale.
• Partner closely with engineering teams to deploy AI and retrieval systems in high-throughput, low-latency environments.
• Take ownership of ambiguous and complex technical problems from research through implementation and contribute to broader product and research direction.
• Mentor engineers, share technical expertise, and help raise the research and engineering standards of the team.

Skills

Applied AI

Information retrieval

Search and ranking

Transformers

Embeddings

Python

Go or C++

Production ML systems

Evaluation metrics

Job description

Partner Company in the Netherlands seeks a Staff/Principal Applied AI Researcher (Agentic Search) to lead research on agent-native retrieval, grounding, and multi-step workflows, delivering scalable AI systems. You will shape evaluation methods beyond traditional metrics and collaborate with engineering and product teams to translate research into production impact.

The role requires deep expertise in search, embeddings, and modern deep learning, with a track record of shipping production ML