Senior AI-Driven Search Engineer — RAG & Vector Search

Smarsh; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

Stock options

PTO

401K match

Sabbatical

Job summary

Smarsh is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the ProArchive Application Development team to design, build, and evolve advanced search and data systems powering our platform. You’ll blend traditional lexical search with AI-driven approaches, including vector search and knowledge graphs, to support compliance-focused, high-performance solutions.

You’ll collaborate across product management, engineering, and SRE to tackle complex challenges at scale, with a focus on hybrid search, real-time

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating software in a modern private cloud-based environment.
• Strong background in distributed systems and search or data-intensive applications.
• Hands-on experience with vector similarity search and vector databases.
• Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) concepts and architectures.
• Understanding of knowledge graphs or graph-based data modeling concepts.
• Experience designing scalable data pipelines and working with streaming technologies such as Kafka.
• Experience contributing to or designing AI/ML-powered systems in production environments.

Responsibilities

• Support and empower your team by contributing to a collaborative, inclusive, and respectful work environment.
• Partner with engineers and stakeholders to design and deliver scalable search and data solutions.
• Bridge traditional lexical search and modern semantic search approaches.
• Design and implement hybrid search strategies combining keyword-based and vector-based retrieval.
• Work with vector databases to manage and query high-dimensional embeddings.
• Design and optimize retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, including handling long documents and retrieval quality.

Skills

Distributed systems

Search

Java

Backend development

Kubernetes

Linux

Kafka

AI/ML in production

Tools

Lucene

Elasticsearch

Solr

Job description

Smarsh is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the ProArchive Application Development team to design, build, and evolve advanced search and data systems powering our platform. You’ll blend traditional lexical search with AI-driven approaches, including vector search and knowledge graphs, to support compliance-focused, high-performance solutions.

You’ll collaborate across product management, engineering, and SRE to tackle complex challenges at scale, with a focus on hybrid search, real-time