Staff Software Engineer - Search

Harmonic; New York (NY); On-site; USD 210,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Harmonic is seeking a senior backend architect to lead the Scout sourcing engine. You will own the end-to-end architecture, from data ingestion to ranking and model orchestration, and drive integration of ML/LLM techniques for high-quality results.

You will mentor engineers, shape long-term technical direction, and partner with Product to craft AI-native experiences. This role is based in the United States, NY, with a focus on scalable, reliable systems.

Qualifications

• 7-8+ years building distributed systems or large-scale backend architecture.
• Designed/scaled search, recommendation, or ranking systems balancing precision, recall, and performance.
• Led or contributed to ML/LLM integrations in production.
• Technical leadership: mentoring others, introducing frameworks, and influencing direction.
• Experience with data-intensive, asynchronous processing or event-driven architectures.

Responsibilities

• Architect the core intelligence behind Scout and own the end-to-end sourcing engine.
• Define scalable retrieval, reranking, and LLM-driven evaluation for personalized results.
• Create architectural patterns to integrate Scout with existing products for repeatable workflows.
• Lead agentic experimentation and evaluation; explore memory systems, embeddings, and prompt libraries.
• Improve evaluation pipelines and enable fast iteration while maintaining reliability and performance.

Skills

Distributed systems

Search systems

ML/LLM integrations

Technical leadership

Data-intensive systems

Job description

About UsHarmonic is the startup discovery engine.

About UsHarmonic is the startup discovery engine. It pains us to see great startup opportunities consistently go unfunded not because of lack of talent, but lack of signal. We're fixing that by mapping the entire startup landscape and building the tools that put the right companies in front of the right people at the right time. Investors, corporate development, and GTM teams use us to find breakout companies before they're obvious and turn that discovery into action. Whether that's a check, an acquisition, partnership or won business. We're growing revenue at a rate of 100%+ annually, backed by $30M from Craft, Floodgate, and Sozo Ventures. We're committed to ensuring hundreds of billions of dollars find the right founders, so the innovations that matters most flourish. If that resonates, let's talk.About The TeamThe Discovery team sits at the core of Harmonic's product and data engine. We make it possible to search, research, analyze, compare, and evaluate across the entire universe of startups (we track tens of millions of companies, hundreds of millions of operators, and tens of thousands of investors along with their deal activity, and counting). We source and ingest data from first-, second-, and third-party sources, including hundreds of fragmented and unstructured sources, and turn them into structured insights and searchable indices. Recently, we built the industry leading agentic layer for startup search and research, unlocking new paradigms for VCs to make sense of this vast amount of data on startups and automate critical tasks in their sourcing and diligence workflows. We're in the middle of a massive platform shift where AI and LLMs are transforming what \"software\" is. Agentic product and user experience patterns will be spelled out in playbooks before long, and we're building those playbooks, not waiting for them. This includes conversational interfaces, deep research, dynamic agentic frameworks purpose built for venture, and AI-first product workflows. We're looking for people who want to help redefine software and push on this frontier with deep curiosity, an insatiable growth mindset, and high agency.To learn more about the team:

• Explore Working with Sang
• Check out your Scout-focused teammates Austin, Yesh, and Kelvin
• Explore the Team Page. We're a mix of ex-founders and seasoned engineers from top engineering institutions like Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Meta.

Who You Are

• You have 7-8+ years of experience building distributed systems or large-scale backend architecture.
• You've designed and scaled search, recommendation, or ranking systems that balance precision, recall, and performance.
• You've led or heavily contributed to ML or LLM integrations in production.
• You have a track record of technical leadership: mentoring others, introducing frameworks, and influencing technical direction.
• You have strong experience with data-intensive systems, asynchronous processing, or event-driven architectures.

What You'll Do

• Architect the core intelligence behind Scout.
  • Own the end-to-end architecture of our sourcing engine, from data ingestion to ranking, personalization, and model orchestration.
  • Define scalable frameworks for retrieval, reranking, and LLM-driven evaluation to ensure we deliver highly personalized, high-quality results.
  • Create architectural patterns that integrate Scout seamlessly with our existing products to power repeatable sourcing workflows.
• Lead agentic experimentation and evaluation.
  • Drive technical discovery for emerging technologies, including memory systems, schema, prompt libraries, embedding models, and agentic frameworks.
  • Improve and extend our evaluation pipelines to test new models and determine lift in specific parts of our product.
  • Build systems that allow fast iteration without compromising quality or reliability. Our priorities are reliability, performance, cost, and then developer productivity.
• Shape AI-native product experiences.
  • Partner with Product and Design to define patterns that make LLM-powered sourcing intuitive and fast.
  • Translate ambiguous product goals into scalable technical designs that unblock new workflows for our users.
  • Establish best practices for building AI-first UX patterns, including agentic flows, async interactions, and structured outputs.
• Provide architectural leadership across engineering.
  • Mentor and guide engineers on the team, raising the bar for system design, documentation, and technical decision making.
  • Drive clarity in cross-team architecture with Flow, Data, and Infra, ensuring Sourcing evolves as a cohesive, maintainable system.
  • Set long-term technical direction for how we build AI-powered sourcing systems.

Our StackThe ProcessHere's our interview process:

• Recruiter Screening: 20 mins
• Technical Screening (Debugging): 45 mins
• Technical Screening (System Design): 45 mins
• Jam Session: 2 hours
• Behavioral interviews with our Head of Engineering and CEO: 30 mins each
• References

Compensation Range: $210K - $280K