Lead/Principal Platform Engineer (Search)

TL;DR

Lead/Principal Platform Engineer (Search): Building a scalable search platform for scientific intelligence to help scientists find answers across billions of data points with an accent on hybrid retrieval, indexing, and scoring. Focus on designing custom ranking logic, implementing semantic and vector search, and architecting distributed systems for bio-pharma R&D data.

Location: Remote (Must be based in the United States)

Company

hirify.global is a Scientific Data and AI Company building Tetra OS to accelerate discovery and manufacturing in life sciences.

What you will do

• Architect a full-stack Search Platform covering all layers of indexing, scoring, query understanding, and federation.
• Engineer sophisticated hybrid search pipelines blending sparse, structured, and dense (vector) retrieval.
• Develop and maintain backend services and APIs using Python and TypeScript.
• Implement scientific entity resolution and knowledge graph pipelines to extract and link biological entities.
• Lead the Search Platform team through hands-on coding, design reviews, and mentoring.
• Own and operate search infrastructure on AWS, ensuring high availability, scalability, and performance.

Requirements

• 10+ years of backend or platform engineering experience building production-grade distributed systems.
• Hands-on expertise with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Lucene, or vector databases, including custom configuration and relevance tuning.
• Strong understanding of semantic retrieval, embeddings, transformer models, and ranking logic.
• Expert-level coding skills in TypeScript and Python.
• Experience operating cloud infrastructure on AWS, including CI/CD and observability.
• No visa sponsorship provided for this position.

Nice to have

• Contributions to open-source search projects like Apache Lucene, Solr, or OpenSearch.
• Experience with cheminformatics tools and libraries (e.g., RDKit).
• Knowledge of entity resolution, knowledge graphs, or NLP pipelines.
• Experience with Databricks or Lakehouse architectures.

Culture & Benefits

• 100% employer-paid benefits for eligible employees and immediate family members.
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO).
• 401K retirement plan.
• Flexible remote working arrangements.
• Company-paid Life Insurance, LTD/STD.
• Culture of continuous improvement with professional coaching.