Search Engineer (AI)

Location: San Francisco, hybrid. US citizens and Green Card holders only; visa sponsorship is not available.

Base salary: $235,000–$260,000+ per year, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global partners with startups and high-growth companies; the client builds an API and data layer that provides clean, structured, LLM-ready data from the live web.

What you will do

• Own ranking quality and relevance for LLM-driven search and retrieval.
• Build and operate crawling, indexing, retrieval, and search-serving infrastructure.
• Improve search quality through lexical, semantic, hybrid, and reranking approaches.
• Reduce latency and cost per query while maintaining relevance, correctness, and reliability.
• Design, deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, measure, and iterate on production systems end to end.
• Solve freshness, incremental indexing, deduplication, crawl scheduling, and large-scale corpus management challenges.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience building and operating production search or retrieval systems, with direct ownership of ranking and relevance.
• A demonstrated ranking or reranking change with measurable impact on relevance, recall, conversion, CTR, NDCG, MRR, or a similar metric.
• Information-retrieval expertise across BM25/lexical, semantic/vector, hybrid retrieval, reranking, and retrieval or RAG evaluation.
• Strong backend and distributed-systems skills in Go, Rust, Python, or a comparable language, with end-to-end production ownership.
• Experience improving latency and cost at meaningful query volume while maintaining quality and reliability.
• Familiarity with tools including Lucene, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS or GCP, gRPC, or Protobuf.

Nice to have

• Experience working in a fast-growing startup and operating with ambiguity.

Culture & Benefits

• Small team of approximately 40 people with direct visibility into founders and leadership.
• Meaningful equity in a fast-growing, well-funded startup.
• 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance, with partial coverage for spouses and children.
• 401(k), pre-tax FSA, commuter benefits, pet insurance, paid parental leave, PTO, wellness stipend, and learning and development budget.
• Paid sabbatical after four years, team offsites twice a year, San Francisco headquarters perks, and a loaner e-bike.

Hiring process

• Intro chat.
• Technical chat and founders chat.
• Paid work trial.