Pioneer AI Context & Data Infra Engineer

Town; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Town is building the most personalized AI assistant, starting with a unified search and retrieval layer to surface the right context across messaging, documents, and apps. You’ll own the data model and pipelines that keep context fresh, fast, and cost-effective at scale.

This greenfield role invites you to design the foundations, implement end-to-end retrieval, and drive production-quality data infrastructure for a world-class AI assistant.

Qualifications

• Experience with lexical and semantic search components (BM25, embeddings, ANN/vector indexes, hybrid retrieval, ranking).
• Experience building large-scale data infrastructure, including realtime/streaming and batch pipelines.
• Ability to optimize retrieval for latency, cost, and freshness at scale.
• Comfort working in greenfield environments where foundations don’t exist yet.
• Interest in taking systems from prototype to production at scale.
• Bonus experience with ranking, knowledge graphs, or retrieval for LLM/agentic systems.

Responsibilities

• Build the search and retrieval layer that puts the right context at every Townie’s fingertips, the moment it’s needed — one shared layer the whole product pulls from instead of refetching context on its own.
• Combine lexical and semantic search and own the tradeoffs between them: vector vs. lexical, precompute vs. fetch, hybrid retrieval, and ranking.
• Design the durable data model the assistant's work is built on, so context is relevant, fast, and cost-effective.
• Build and operate the pipelines behind it — realtime/streaming and batch — that keep the index fresh and correct as the underlying data changes.
• Stand up the indexing and storage layer and keep it fast and reliable at scale: latency, cost, freshness, and completeness.
• Lay the groundwork for relating content by meaning across everything the assistant knows — the start of a knowledge graph of people, companies, projects, and connections.

Skills

Lexical search

Semantic search

Data infrastructure

Job description

Town is building the most personalized AI assistant, starting with a unified search and retrieval layer to surface the right context across messaging, documents, and apps. You’ll own the data model and pipelines that keep context fresh, fast, and cost-effective at scale.

This greenfield role invites you to design the foundations, implement end-to-end retrieval, and drive production-quality data infrastructure for a world-class AI assistant.