Senior Software Engineer, Search

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 builds AI systems for the Department of War's most consequential missions. We have 125 deployments across every branch and combatant command spanning our core platform and five distinct products. An an example of how we work, when major combat operations started with Iran, we fielded a new product supporting 24/7 operations and 9,000+ users in three months.
How we build is our advantage: we deploy forward with the people who own the mission. Our engineers, product team, and CTO deploy forward to the point of friction, including visiting units in Ukraine. We focus on embedding directly with operational units supporting great power competition with China, combat operations with Iran, and counter-narcotics missions.

Search is at the heart of Vannevar’s flagship platform and agentic workflows. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer, with substantial knowledge and passion for search and information retrieval, to drive innovation in this space. In this role, you will work directly with our ML and product teams to advance a state-of-the-art search system that fundamentally drives our users’ ability to surface mission critical information.

• 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
• You have 7+ years of experience in backend software development, with 3+ years in search, information retrieval, or related fields
• You have a passion for architecting, developing and deploying reliable, scalable, and performant systems
• You have expertise in information retrieval, NLP, and machine learning. You have a deep understanding of concepts like indexing, ranking, query parsing, tokenization, and vector search.
• You have hands‑on experience with at least one major search engine (e.g., Elasticsearch, OpenSearch), and familiarity with search evaluation frameworks (e.g., precision, recall, NDCG).
• You have excellent analytical, problem-solving, leadership, and communication skills.
• U.S. Person status is required as this position will require the ability to access U.S. only data systems.

The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $215,000 + equity. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, relevant education, and/or training.

We’re proud to offer competitive benefits that support our employees. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Remote friendly with WeWork access
• Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year
• 401(k) match
• Salary top-up during military reserve duty
• Fully paid parental leave
• Child and pet care reimbursement during travel

IMPORTANT NOTICE
We are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @vannevarlabs.com domain. Under no circumstances will a legitimate representative from our company contact you to request passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data. Please be vigilant of potential scams.