Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Search & Retrieval)

Actively AI

New York (NY)

On-site

USD 160,000 - 220,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Early-Stage Equity

Health, Dental, Vision Coverage

Unlimited PTO + Recharge Days

Catered Lunch on Tuesday & Friday

Fully Stocked Kitchen

Cutting-Edge Tech & Tools

Annual Off-sites & Monthly Events

Commuter Benefits

Cozy Office in NYC

Job summary

Dormont Manufacturing Co is seeking a Senior / Staff Software Engineer - Search & Retrieval in New York, NY. The role involves building and scaling retrieval systems for AI agents, turning raw data into retrievable formats, and designing ranking systems.

The ideal candidate will have 5+ years of experience in search systems and a background in machine learning. This position offers competitive compensation and benefits, including unlimited PTO and health coverage.

Qualifications

5+ years of experience building and operating retrieval systems.
Experience with hybrid retrieval approaches and relevance tuning.
Understanding of fresh data indexing and retrieval pipelines.

Responsibilities

Design and scale search and retrieval infrastructure for AI agents.
Create enrichment and entity extraction systems for data.
Develop APIs and interfaces for retrieval across teams.

Skills

Search systems

Information retrieval

Machine learning

Data indexing

Job description

About Actively AI

Actively AI is defining a new category: Intelligence-Led Revenue.

Revenue organizations have always been bottlenecked on human capacity. Reps triage which accounts get attention. Context disappears at every handoff. On any given day, the vast majority of accounts have exactly zero people thinking about them.

Actively addresses this at the structural level. Our platform deploys Per-Account AgentsTM across our customers’ TAM, working 24/7 to research, identify opportunities, and advance next steps without being asked. Leading enterprises including Ramp, Ironclad, and Samsara are already making this shift.

Our co-founders are former Stanford AI researchers, and the team comes from Harvard, CMU, Berkeley, Brex, Scale AI, and Google. We’ve raised $68M from TCV, First Harmonic, Bain Capital Ventures, First Round Capital, and more.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior / Staff Software Engineer - Search & Retrieval to build and scale the systems that power Actively’s AI agents to find, rank, and reason over data.

When an Actively agent decides which account to prioritize or what action to take next, it reasons over retrieved context; data pulled from customer records, call transcripts, signals, and internal intelligence. Get that retrieval right and the agent acts with precision. Get it wrong and it doesn’t matter how good the underlying model is.

You’ll design and build the search, retrieval, and relevance infrastructure that feeds every agent at Actively from the enrichment and entity extraction that turns raw data into something queryable, to the ranking systems that determine what context an agent actually sees. The data is diverse, messy, and customer-specific. Freshness matters. So does precision. And the consumer isn’t a human browsing results but it’s a model that will act on whatever you give it.

What You’ll Do

Build the retrieval layer agents depend on. Design and scale the search and retrieval infrastructure that feeds Actively’s agents, covering indexing, querying, ranking, and filtering across diverse customer data sources.
Turn raw, unstructured data into something retrievable. Design enrichment and entity extraction systems that pull structure, relationships, and context out of call transcripts, documents, and signals, making them queryable in ways that improve what agents actually see.
Own the Search for Agents Architecture: Define how data gets represented and stored, making deliberate choices about granularity, embedding models, and index configuration for different data types and use cases.
Build and iterate on ranking systems. Design and deploy reranking layers that maximize relevance for agent queries, and evolve them as data patterns and use cases change.
Develop shared retrieval primitives. Build the APIs and retrieval interfaces used by the Intelligence, Assistant, and Orchestration teams, balancing flexibility with consistency across consumers.
Own retrieval quality end to end. Build and maintain evaluation infrastructure using classical IR metrics, task-level success signals, and LLM-based techniques, catching regressions before they affect agent behavior.

Who You Are

Deep experience in search or retrieval systems. You have 5+ years building and operating retrieval systems in production, across multiple customers, data sources, or domains, and understand what relevance actually means at scale.
Background in information retrieval or applied ML. You’ve tuned relevance, deployed reranking strategies, and improved result quality in production, not just in experiments.
Understands the freshness problem. You’ve built retrieval pipelines over fast-changing data, including near-real-time indexing, incremental updates, or event-driven ingestion, and know how freshness trade-offs affect system design.
Comfortable with hybrid retrieval approaches. You’ve worked with systems that combine semantic search, keyword and lexical matching, and metadata filtering to balance recall, precision, and reliability.
Rigorous about evaluation. You’ve designed or evolved retrieval evaluation frameworks using IR metrics, task-level success signals, or automated quality checks, and you treat regressions as real incidents.
Thinks about retrieval architecture holistically. You know when to pre-compute versus retrieve at query time, how to manage index growth, and how to design retrieval paths that stay relevant as scale increases.

Nice to Haves

Prior experience at a search or retrieval-focused company (Elastic, Algolia, Cohere, Pinecone, Weaviate) or building shared search infrastructure used across multiple teams or products.
Experience with entity resolution, knowledge graph construction, or relationship extraction at scale, particularly over noisy or inconsistently structured source data.

Actively AI provides an estimate of the compensation for roles that may be hired as required by state regulations. Compensation may vary based on (a) location, as Actively AI factors in specific location when benchmarking compensation for most roles; (b) individual candidate skills and qualifications; and (c) individual candidate experience. Additionally, Actively AI leverages current market data to determine compensation, so posted compensation figures are subject to change as new market data becomes available. The salary, other compensation, and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Actively.ai reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.

Actively AI is committed to equal treatment and opportunity in all aspects of recruitment, selection, and employment without regard to gender, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other category protected under the law. Actively AI is an equal opportunity employer; committed to a community of inclusion, and an environment free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.

Compensation Range:

$160,000—$220,000 USD

Why Join

At Actively, you write playbooks rather than follow them. You own outcomes, not just tasks, and see directly how your work changes what customers can do — across a product and go-to-market motion that is scaling fast.

The team is high-caliber and low-ego: people who work from first principles, move with urgency, and care deeply about building something that drives real value. If that’s the kind of challenge you’re looking for, Actively is the right place.

Benefits