Senior Search Engineer (Elasticsearch)

TL;DR

Senior Search Engineer (Elasticsearch): Owning and evolving the search platform for a high-growth fintech AI company with an accent on Elasticsearch architecture, relevance tuning, and system scalability. Focus on building robust APIs and tooling that empower internal engineering teams to leverage advanced retrieval capabilities for financial data.

Location: Must be based in London (Hybrid)

Company

hirify.global is an AI-powered platform centralizing proprietary credit data and analysis for global debt markets, serving over 300 blue-chip financial institutions.

What you will do

• Design, operate, and evolve the Elasticsearch cluster and its surrounding infrastructure.
• Build and maintain the APIs and tooling that enable other engineering teams to utilize the search platform.
• Define the technical roadmap for search and retrieval, including integration with AI and RAG capabilities.
• Ensure system performance, reliability, and relevance at scale.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to high-level architectural decisions and engineering standards.

Requirements

• Must have production ownership experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or similar technologies (Solr, Vespa, Lucene).
• Deep understanding of search internals including mappings, analyzers, shard strategies, and cluster behavior.
• Proven experience designing search infrastructure, including data pipelines, query performance, and index lifecycle management.
• Ability to build accessible and reliable tooling/APIs for internal engineering teams.
• Strong collaboration skills to translate product needs into technical search capabilities.

Nice to have

• Experience with Python and modern web frameworks like FastAPI.
• Familiarity with distributed systems concepts (consistency, partitioning, replication).
• Experience with cloud-managed search deployments (Elastic Cloud / AWS).
• Exposure to AI/ML systems, specifically vector search, hybrid retrieval, or RAG pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive salary with equity options.
• Pension scheme with company matching up to 7%.
• Private Medical Insurance, Income Protection, and Group Life Assurance.
• 25 days of holiday plus the ability to exchange public holidays.
• Hybrid working model with the option to work abroad for up to 3 months per year.
• Professional learning and development budget.