Staff Software Engineer, Search Retrieval Platform 

Responsibilities: Translate customer and product needs into reusable platform capabilities in collaboration with product and client teams Design retrieval APIs and search services with consistent contracts, tunable ranking, and low-latency payloads for agent contexts Make retrieval customizable via pluggable components (chunking, enrichment, embedding, ranking, models) accessible through self-service APIs Own data ingestion and indexing on the platform, including streaming pipelines and zero-downtime index changes Partner with Research Engineering and Applied Science to move retrieval techniques from experiment to production-ready capabilities Collaborate with product and client teams to prioritize roadmaps and improve platform adoption Incorporate evaluation into the platform (offline/online evaluation, LLM-as-judge scoring, experiments) Own security posture, multi-tenant isolation, entitlements at query time, and telemetry for user content protection Own SLOs, observability, on-call responsibilities, and tracing for agentic retrieval paths Set architectural direction across retrieval, search services, and APIs; mentor engineers and promote AI-assisted development

Key requirements: 8+ years of software engineering with progression to staff-level scope Experience building search, retrieval, or data-intensive platforms at scale; strong distributed systems fundamentals; Python/Java/Go Experience translating customer needs into platform capabilities across product, engineering, and science Experience designing APIs and services consumed by multiple teams with contracts and versioning considerations Operational rigor: SLOs, observability, on-call ownership, incident learning Fluency with AI-assisted development tools cross-functional collaboration technical leadership mentorship search engines (Vespa, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch) hybrid (dense and sparse) retrieval, ranking, embedding pipelines agentic retrieval patterns and MCP protocols