Senior AI Engineer, Retrieval & Ranking (Remote)

Recruits Lab; Washington, Baltimore (District of Columbia, MD); Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Recruits Lab seeks an experienced AI systems engineer to build production NLP/IR pipelines for life sciences talent. You will own retrieval, scoring, and guardrails for high-stakes staffing, collaborating with leadership to ship measurable impact.

You will translate complex domain rules, drive end-to-end ML workflows, and ensure auditable outputs that support rapid, decision-ready candidate shortlists across regions.

Qualifications

• Shipped production NLP/IR or ranking systems evaluated by human judgment.
• Owns LLM applications with retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, and guardrails for high‑stakes, PII‑sensitive workflows.
• Translates messy domain rules (territory, quota, multi‑stakeholder cycles) into features, labels, and product behavior recruiters will trust.
• Proven delivery as a principal IC: architecture, code, evals, and stakeholder alignment without a large platform org underneath you.
• Clear written communication that matches how we work: specific, outcome‑based, no jargon theater.

Responsibilities

• Ship, within 90 days, a production retrieval and ranking pipeline that improves passive-candidate shortlist quality (precision at 10) by at least 25% versus current sourcing on two live life sciences searches.
• Design and own an evaluation harness that measures match quality against hiring-manager calibration notes, quota/territory constraints, and named-account verification—not keyword overlap—and report lift monthly.
• Reduce time-to-calibrated-shortlist on repeat search types by 30% within six months by automating mapping of competitor talent pools and adjacent buyer relationships.
• Put LLM-assisted screening into the recruiter workflow so structured signals (quota history, cycle length, technical-buyer fluency) are extracted, scored, and auditable—without hallucinated claims.
• Partner with search leads to productize one “search OS” capability per quarter (territory graph, relationship density, or forecast-of-close) that recruiters actually use on live mandates.
• Establish data contracts, PII handling, and model-risk reviews so every candidate-facing and client-facing output is defensible in a relationship-driven staffing business.

Skills

Production NLP/IR systems

LLM applications with retrieval

PII handling

Domain rules to features

Principal IC delivery

Clear written communication

Tools

Vector stores

LLM platforms

Job description

Recruits Lab seeks an experienced AI systems engineer to build production NLP/IR pipelines for life sciences talent. You will own retrieval, scoring, and guardrails for high-stakes staffing, collaborating with leadership to ship measurable impact.

You will translate complex domain rules, drive end-to-end ML workflows, and ensure auditable outputs that support rapid, decision-ready candidate shortlists across regions.