Senior AI Search Engineer — Infra & Ranking (Equity)

Lavendo, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 235,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

100% employer-paid health/dental/vison

PTO 15+ days

Parental leave 12 weeks

Learning & development budget

Wellness stipend

Job summary

Lavendo, Inc. partners with startups to hire top-tier talent. Our client builds the data layer that AI agents run on, turning URLs into clean, structured data.

As a Search Engineer, you will own ranking and relevance for a high-quality, scalable open web search system, addressing freshness, deduplication, latency, and cost. You will work directly with the Head of Search and a small team to shape the roadmap, improve crawling, indexing, retrieval, and serving infrastructure, and ship measurable

Qualifications

• 3+ years building and operating production search or retrieval systems, with direct ownership of ranking and relevance.
• A specific example of a ranking or reranking change you owned and the measurable impact it had on relevance, recall, conversion, CTR, NDCG, MRR, or a similar metric
• Hands-on information-retrieval depth across BM25/lexical, semantic/vector, hybrid retrieval, reranking, and retrieval or RAG evaluation
• Strong backend and distributed-systems skills in Go, Rust, Python, or a comparable language, with end-to-end production ownership
• Experience improving latency and cost at meaningful query volume while maintaining quality and reliability
• Familiarity with search and infrastructure tooling such as Lucene, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS/GCP, gRPC, or Protobuf

Responsibilities

• Own ranking quality and relevance for LLM-driven search and retrieval
• Build and operate the crawling, indexing, retrieval, and search-serving systems behind the product.
• Improve search quality using lexical, semantic, hybrid, and reranking approaches
• Reduce latency and cost per query as query volume and corpus size grow, without compromising relevance, correctness, or reliability
• Own systems end to end: design, build, deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, measure, and iterate in production
• Solve for freshness, incremental indexing, deduplication, crawl scheduling, and large-scale corpus management
• Work directly with the Head of Search and the team to shape the roadmap and ship customer-facing improvements quickly

Skills

Ownership of ranking & relevance

Information retrieval depth

Backend & distributed systems

Latency & cost optimization

Go/Rust/Python

Lucene/Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Tools

Lucene

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Redis

Kafka

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Docker

AWS/GCP

gRPC/Protobuf

Job description

Lavendo, Inc. partners with startups to hire top-tier talent. Our client builds the data layer that AI agents run on, turning URLs into clean, structured data.

As a Search Engineer, you will own ranking and relevance for a high-quality, scalable open web search system, addressing freshness, deduplication, latency, and cost. You will work directly with the Head of Search and a small team to shape the roadmap, improve crawling, indexing, retrieval, and serving infrastructure, and ship measurable