Query Engine Engineer (AI)

Location: In-person opportunity in Zurich, Switzerland

Company

hirify.global is an applied AI lab building a web-scale search engine, embedding models, vector databases, and a knowledge engine used by hundreds of thousands of developers.

What you will do

• Own the query engine for hundreds of billions of evidence-backed claims across 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 retrieval backends, execution order, joins, traversals, filters, and aggregations.
• Optimize high-concurrency serving for thousands of queries per second, 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.
• Build deployment checks, evaluations, and metrics for precision, completeness, and query correctness.

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 systems and shipping measured latency improvements in production.
• Strong focus on correctness, reliability, and data quality at 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

• Greenfield systems work with foundational decisions spanning storage, indexing, query languages, and query planning.
• Premium medical, dental, and vision healthcare benefits.
• Fertility benefits and 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents.
• Monthly wellness stipend for employees.
• International candidates are eligible for visa sponsorship, including STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, and E3, subject to approval.