Senior Data Engineer (Search Platform)

TL;DR

Senior Data Engineer (Search Platform): Design and develop retrieval, ranking, and evaluation systems powering AI agents, including building data pipelines and production code. Focus on building lexical and neural retrieval systems, evaluation metrics, and data pipeline design for precise document processing.

Location: On-site in Berlin, Germany

Salary: €80,000–€110,000 plus equity

Company

hirify.global is a Berlin-based startup transforming audits with AI, backed by top-tier VCs and focused on automating repetitive audit tasks.

What you will do

• Build and tune lexical and neural retrieval and ranking systems
• Own evaluation datasets, metrics, dashboards, and regression analysis
• Design data pipelines for ingestion, enrichment, and classification
• Ship production code including Python services, APIs, and SQL models
• Improve relevance through experimentation and systematic analysis

Requirements

• Must have 5+ years experience as software engineer or applied scientist with information retrieval expertise
• Strong data engineering skills
• Knowledge of IR fundamentals such as BM25, TF-IDF, and neural retrieval
• Comfortable with evaluation metrics like NDCG, MRR, Precision@K
• Proficient in Python (asyncio, type hints, pandas) and SQL (modeling, window functions, CTEs, optimization)
• Experience designing and maintaining production APIs

Nice to have

• Experience with learning-to-rank, re-ranking, and relevance tuning
• Familiarity with distributed compute/orchestration tools like Spark, Ray, or Temporal
• Experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch at scale
• Knowledge of data warehouses such as BigQuery or Snowflake
• Experience with post-training language models for retrieval/ranking

Culture & Benefits

• High impact and growth opportunities shaping strategy at a scaling AI startup
• Mission-driven culture valuing first-principles thinking and bold ideas
• Competitive salary and significant equity
• Learning budget for courses and conferences
• Flexible vacation, team lunches, retreats, and central Berlin office

Hiring process

• Introductory call with Founders Associate
• Technical interview
• Cultural deep dive interview
• On-site half-day working session in Berlin