Applied Search & Retrieval Expert

Location: Belgrade, Serbia — hybrid

Company

hirify.global develops a brand management platform used by companies worldwide to create consistent brand experiences.

What you will do

• Own and evolve the search and retrieval architecture across existing and expanding search initiatives.
• Design and operate retrieval evaluation systems covering golden datasets, automated metrics, human evaluation, regression testing, and failure analysis.
• Define technical decision principles for what to build, buy, tune, simplify, or skip.
• Improve search quality across messy, heterogeneous, and evolving data contexts.
• Diagnose issues across data quality, indexing, embeddings, query formulation, ranking, permissions, product UX, and evaluation design.
• Guide trade-offs between quality, latency, cost, and complexity while sharing expertise with the wider engineering team.

Requirements

• Production experience building, owning, or significantly shaping search and retrieval systems in larger product environments.
• Practical experience with keyword, vector, and hybrid search, including ranking, reranking, query understanding, chunking, metadata strategies, and relevance tuning.
• Strong knowledge of traditional search technologies, including text analysis, tokenization, BM25, lexical ranking, index architecture, structured retrieval, and permission-aware search.
• Experience designing and operating retrieval evaluation systems with golden datasets, human evaluation, automated metrics, regression testing, and failure analysis.
• Ability to diagnose retrieval issues and communicate trade-offs between quality, latency, cost, and complexity.
• Strong engineering judgment and experience working with messy, heterogeneous, and evolving real-world data.

Nice to have

• Experience with OpenSearch or comparable enterprise search technologies.
• Experience supporting reliable, secure, and well-scoped MCP server capabilities.
• Experience migrating or evolving production search systems without significant downtime or disruption.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible working hours and a focus on work-life balance.
• Yearly retreats, workshops, hackathons, and other team activities.
• Knowledge-sharing sessions, webinars, and opportunities for professional growth.
• Collaboration with an international team of experienced engineers.
• Modern, open workplace with a positive and collaborative atmosphere.