Senior AI Search Engineer — Hybrid RAG & Vector Search

OpenKrill; United States; Hybrid; USD 72,000 - 103,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Performance bonus

Referral rewards

Flexible time off

13 paid holidays

Sick leave support

Parental leave

Health benefits

Job summary

8am is expanding its Czech Republic R&D hub and seeks a Senior Engineer to design and deploy AI-powered search features. You will contribute to the Unified AI Platform, combining keyword search with semantic retrieval across large datasets.

You’ll work with AWS, data engineers, and product teams to ship scalable, production-ready solutions. Ideal candidates have 5+ years of backend or search infrastructure experience, hands-on with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Python, and vector embeddings, and a

Qualifications

• Experience building search or retrieval systems for large document stores.
• Hands-on with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or similar platforms.
• Experience combining keyword retrieval with vector embeddings.
• Strong Python development skills and production SaaS experience.
• Familiarity with document processing pipelines (chunking, embedding, indexing).
• Experience deploying services in AWS and modern DevOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product managers to translate problems into AI-powered search solutions.
• Design and build hybrid search systems combining BM25 and vector search.
• Develop and optimize retrieval pipelines for RAG and AI-driven apps.
• Build scalable pipelines for ingestion, embedding generation, and ranking.
• Work with Data to ensure data is collected, enriched, chunked, and indexed.
• Design AI services that combine LLMs with search infrastructure.
• Write high-quality Python code to manipulate data and evaluate retrieval performance.
• Develop tools for relevance tuning and search quality improvements.
• Collaborate with Cloud Ops to deploy AI search services and monitor latency.

Skills

Search infra

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Python

AWS

RAG

Embeddings

Hybrid search

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Solr

Job description

8am is expanding its Czech Republic R&D hub and seeks a Senior Engineer to design and deploy AI-powered search features. You will contribute to the Unified AI Platform, combining keyword search with semantic retrieval across large datasets.

You’ll work with AWS, data engineers, and product teams to ship scalable, production-ready solutions. Ideal candidates have 5+ years of backend or search infrastructure experience, hands-on with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Python, and vector embeddings, and a