Search Systems Engineer - Expert

Obsidian; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Obsidian is seeking engineers who have shipped production search systems and are thinking deeply about requirements and optimizations, especially with agentic search and LLM-era challenges. You likely have owned relevance or retrieval for real users and know how to quantify impact and improvements.

This is a 25-minute conversational interview with no coding or take-home tasks. We want to hear how you actually think about search quality, evaluation, and trade-offs in real systems.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping production search systems.
• Hands-on experience with relevance or retrieval in real-user systems.
• Experience with agentic search concepts and LLM-enabled workflows.
• Ability to quantify impact and improvements in search systems.

Responsibilities

• Discuss how you think about search quality, evaluation, and trade-offs in real systems.
• Share war stories about challenges and improvements in production search.

Job description

We're looking for engineers who have shipped production search systems (especially agentic ones now that we're in the era of LLMs and agents) and are thinking hard about the requirements and optimizations of those systems.

You've probably:

• Owned relevance or retrieval on a system real users depended on

• Decided how to quantify impact and improvements with these systems.

• Built out systems related to agentic search.

• Scaled data infrastructure to power modern search systems.

This is a 25-minute conversational interview. No coding, no take-home. We want to hear how you actually think about search quality, evaluation, and the tradeoffs you've made in real systems. Bring war stories — the messier and more specific, the better.

If your interview stands out, we'll follow up with a paid 30-minute live conversation with our team — $200 for your time, paid on completion of the call.