Query Engine Engineer (AI)

Location: In-person in San Francisco, California, United States.

Salary: $180K–$350K per year, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global is an applied AI lab building a large-scale search engine, web-crawling infrastructure, embedding models, vector databases, and a knowledge engine.

What you will do

• Own the query engine for hundreds of billions of evidence-backed claims across distributed graph, vector, full-text, time-series, and geospatial retrieval backends.
• Design storage layouts, partitioning, indexes, bulk snapshot builds, and live ingestion without downtime.
• Build cost-based query planning that selects backends, execution order, joins, traversals, retrievals, filters, and aggregations.
• Optimize high-concurrency performance to serve thousands of queries per second while reducing p50/p99 latency, memory use, and cost per query.
• Define consistency behavior for live updates and bulk snapshots, including snapshot promotion, ordered updates, and stable pagination across versions.
• Develop deployment checks, evaluations, and metrics for retrieval precision, completeness, correctness, reliability, and data quality.

Requirements

• Deep experience working inside a distributed database, query engine, search engine, or storage system.
• Strong understanding of indexing, query planning and optimization, and storage formats.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including consensus, replication, sharding, and fault tolerance.
• Strong proficiency in Go, Rust, or C++.
• Experience profiling before optimization and shipping measured latency improvements in production.
• Strong focus on correctness, reliability, data quality, and scale.

Nice to have

• Experience with graph databases or combining vector, full-text, time-series, and geospatial retrieval.
• Experience with compilers, query language design, or cost-based optimizers.

Culture & Benefits

• Premium medical, dental, and vision healthcare benefits.
• Fertility benefits and 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents.
• Monthly wellness stipend.
• Visa sponsorship is available for international candidates, including STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, and E3; sponsorship is not guaranteed.