Staff Software Engineer, Code Search & Retrieval Architect

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation bonus

Housing bonus

Meals stipend

Equinox membership

Health insurance

Generous equity

Job summary

Mercor is seeking a Software Engineer for Code Search & Retrieval in San Francisco. You will own the architecture for searching across code tasks, combining dense embeddings with lexical signals to route to the right models and translate NLP questions into precise queries.

You will lead the end-to-end system design, continuously evolve embeddings and models, and mentor other engineers while shipping production code at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years at Senior level or above.
• Deep expertise building search and retrieval systems: dense embeddings, lexical scoring, hybrid ranking.
• Strong understanding of vector/ANN indices and indexed search engines.
• Experience with code search or code understanding is a plus; ability to route tasks to appropriate models.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of Mercor's code search and retrieval systems end to end: hybrid retrieval with dense code embeddings and BM25.
• Identify and retrieve similar code tasks, ensuring semantics and difficulty are captured beyond surface text.
• Design and operate indexing pipelines that keep task indexes fresh as new tasks arrive.
• Mentor engineers, drive technical direction, and participate in design reviews.

Job description

Mercor is seeking a Software Engineer for Code Search & Retrieval in San Francisco. You will own the architecture for searching across code tasks, combining dense embeddings with lexical signals to route to the right models and translate NLP questions into precise queries.

You will lead the end-to-end system design, continuously evolve embeddings and models, and mentor other engineers while shipping production code at scale.