Research Engineer (Search/IR)

TL;DR

Research Engineer (Search/IR): Building and operating the core search and information retrieval infrastructure to serve web content at scale with an accent on indexing pipelines, ranking quality, and retrieval speed. Focus on solving complex challenges in freshness, deduplication, and incremental indexing for AI agents.

Location: Hybrid in San Francisco, CA or Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10). US Citizenship/Visa required for SF.

Salary: $180,000 – $290,000 per year

Company

hirify.global provides the fastest way for developers to get LLM-ready web data via a single API call, achieving 8-figure ARR within its first year.

What you will do

• Design and maintain large-scale indexing infrastructure handling billions of documents.
• Own the full search stack from ingestion and processing to ranking and serving.
• Develop ranking models and relevance scoring systems to improve query understanding.
• Build systems for content freshness, intelligent deduplication, and incremental indexing.
• Conduct rigorous experiments and ship performance-improving results to production.
• Collaborate with RL Research Engineers to align search improvements with model training.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience building large-scale search/IR systems.
• Proven track record of deploying ranking models (BM25, embeddings) in production.
• Experience owning the entire pipeline: ingestion, indexing, and serving.
• Ability to handle operational complexity like sharding and index compaction.
• Must be based in the Americas (UTC-3 to UTC-10).
• US Citizenship/Visa required for the San Francisco office.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive salary and up to 0.15% equity.
• Generous PTO (15 days mandatory) and 12 weeks paid parental leave.
• Comprehensive US health insurance (Medical, Dental, Vision) and 401(k).
• Wellness stipend ($100/mo) and L&D budget ($1,000/yr).
• Three-month paid sabbatical after 4 years of service.

Hiring process

• Application review followed by a 20-minute intro chat.
• 60-minute technical deep dive on search/IR architecture and tradeoffs.
• Founder chat and a 1-2 week paid work trial on a real production problem.