Senior Search Engineer (IR/ML) – Remote, Equity

Vannevar Labs; United States; Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 215,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Remote-friendly with WeWork access

Unlimited PTO

401(k) match

Salary top-up during military reserve

Fully paid parental leave

Child and pet care reimbursement

Job summary

Vannevar Labs in the United States is seeking a Senior Software Engineer focused on search and information retrieval to advance a state-of-the-art search system across our platform.

You will collaborate with ML and product teams to design strategy for full-text search, vector databases, NLP, and ranking, and you will help improve latency and relevance.

This role offers equity and a competitive benefits package in a remote-friendly environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend software development experience, 3+ years in search or related fields.
• Passion for architecting and deploying reliable, scalable systems.
• Expertise in information retrieval, NLP, and ML concepts like vector search, indexing, ranking.
• Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and familiarity with evaluation metrics (precision, recall, NDCG).

Responsibilities

• Design and adapt the technical strategy for search within Vannevar’s products, including how we leverage full-text search, vector databases, LLMs, NLP, and relevance algorithms
• Improve both search latency and relevance
• Collaborate with product engineers, designers, and mission strategists to translate user needs into data-informed search innovations
• Research and apply emerging technologies, trends and best practices in the search/information retrieval domain to improve index quality, freshness, and retrieval performance

Skills

Backend software development

Search / information retrieval

NLP

Machine learning

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Vector search

Indexing

Ranking

Query parsing

Tokenization

Leadership

Communication

Tools

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Job description

Vannevar Labs in the United States is seeking a Senior Software Engineer focused on search and information retrieval to advance a state-of-the-art search system across our platform.

You will collaborate with ML and product teams to design strategy for full-text search, vector databases, NLP, and ranking, and you will help improve latency and relevance.

This role offers equity and a competitive benefits package in a remote-friendly environment.