Senior/Staff Search & Retrieval Engineer for AI Agents

Actively; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Dental, Vision

Unlimited PTO

Catered meals

Fully stocked kitchen

Office in NYC

Commuter benefits

Equity

Job summary

Actively AI is seeking a Senior / Staff Software Engineer - Search & Retrieval to design and scale the systems that power our AI agents. You will build the retrieval, enrichment, and ranking layers that turn raw data into actionable context for agents, with a focus on freshness, precision, and cross-data-source support.

You will own the search architecture, evaluate relevance across diverse data types, and deliver robust APIs used by multiple product teams.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production retrieval systems across multiple data sources
• Background in information retrieval or applied ML
• Experience with near real-time indexing and freshness trade-offs
• Comfortable with hybrid retrieval approaches (semantic + keyword + metadata)
• Rigorous evaluation using IR metrics and automated quality checks

Responsibilities

• Build the retrieval layer and scale indexing, querying, ranking, and filtering across diverse data sources
• Design enrichment and entity extraction to surface structured, queryable context
• Define data representations and index configurations for different data types
• Build and iterate on ranking and reranking systems to maximize relevance
• Develop shared retrieval primitives and APIs used by multiple teams
• Own retrieval quality end-to-end with evaluation infrastructure

Skills

Retrieval systems

Information retrieval

Freshness handling

Hybrid retrieval

IR evaluation

Holistic architecture

Tools

Elastic

Algolia

Pinecone

Weaviate

Job description

Actively AI is seeking a Senior / Staff Software Engineer - Search & Retrieval to design and scale the systems that power our AI agents. You will build the retrieval, enrichment, and ranking layers that turn raw data into actionable context for agents, with a focus on freshness, precision, and cross-data-source support.

You will own the search architecture, evaluate relevance across diverse data types, and deliver robust APIs used by multiple product teams.