Senior ML Engineer, Vector Search & Indexing

Icehouseventures; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 312,000 - 351,000; Full time

Job summary

Wayve in Sunnyvale, CA (hybrid) is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Search & Indexing team to make Wayve’s massive multimodal video data discoverable and searchable. You’ll help scale the indexing infrastructure powering vector-based and metadata-based retrieval across data curation, training set construction, and ML research.

You’ll shape architecture, own key components, and deliver an MVP system within months, balancing build-vs-buy decisions and leveraging off‑the‑shelf

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or ML systems building production systems.
• Experience with vector databases or ANN technologies such as FAISS, LanceDB, or similar open-source solutions.
• Strong understanding of multimodal embeddings and experience evaluating search quality across relevance, recall, filtering accuracy, and performance.
• Strong coding skills in Python or other systems languages
• Experience building search services, APIs, and large-scale ingestion and indexing pipelines.
• Experience delivering 0→1 systems in ambiguous or exploratory problem spaces.
• Comfortable working across system boundaries (infra, ML, data curation).

Responsibilities

• Build and operate production search and indexing systems at billion-vector scale.
• Apply and evaluate embedding models for semantic and multimodal retrieval, including inference, normalization, versioning, and integration.
• Build evaluation frameworks to measure retrieval quality, recall, relevance, filtering accuracy, latency, freshness, scalability, and cost.
• Develop backend services and APIs for vector similarity and metadata-filtered search.
• Own search components from design and implementation through deployment and production operations.
• Collaborate with ML, Data, and Evaluation teams to integrate search into training, curation, and evaluation workflows.
• Support the growth of other engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, knowledge sharing, and mentoring.

Skills

Backend systems

Vector databases

Python

Search services

ML systems

System integration

0→1 projects

Large-scale ML

Tools

FAISS

LanceDB

Job description

Wayve in Sunnyvale, CA (hybrid) is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Search & Indexing team to make Wayve’s massive multimodal video data discoverable and searchable. You’ll help scale the indexing infrastructure powering vector-based and metadata-based retrieval across data curation, training set construction, and ML research.

You’ll shape architecture, own key components, and deliver an MVP system within months, balancing build-vs-buy decisions and leveraging off‑the‑shelf