Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Search & Retrieval)

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

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 USD - $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

• Competitive Early-Stage Equity
• Health, Dental, Vision Coverage
• Unlimited PTO + Recharge Days
• Catered Lunch on Tuesday & Friday, Dinners every day!
• Fully Stocked Kitchen
• Cutting-Edge Tech & Tools
• Annual Off-sites & Monthly Events
• Commuter Benefits
• Cozy Office in NYC