Senior/Staff Software Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Senior/Staff Software Engineer (AI): Building scalable knowledge retrieval infrastructure for LLM-powered applications with an accent on distributed backend systems, vector databases, semantic search, and indexing pipelines. Focus on designing retrieval orchestration, optimizing large-scale inference workloads, and improving reliability, security, and search quality.

Location: Hybrid in New York City, United States

Salary: $190,000–$270,000 in cash compensation, plus equity

Company

hirify.global provides vector database and knowledge infrastructure for building scalable AI applications.

What you will do

• Design and build scalable platform components for query planning, semantic search, hybrid retrieval, metadata-aware search, and LLM generation.
• Develop optimized indexing pipelines for structured and unstructured data.
• Build backend services for retrieval, knowledge graph construction, and retrieval orchestration.
• Create evaluation and observability frameworks to improve retrieval quality.
• Design APIs for internal, external, and agentic consumers.
• Optimize latency, throughput, cost, reliability, and security across large-scale inference and retrieval workloads.

Requirements

• Typically 6+ years of experience shipping production-grade backend systems at scale.
• Strong architectural experience with high-throughput, low-latency, maintainable systems and indexing pipelines.
• Experience or deep knowledge of semantic search, vector databases, hybrid retrieval, or search engines such as Elastic or OpenSearch.
• Understanding of RAG patterns, embedding pipelines, query planning, and metadata filtering.
• Expertise in at least one major programming language, such as Go, Rust, C++, Java, or Python.
• Experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, observability, and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi.

Nice to have

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Experience with retrieval evaluation frameworks and measuring search quality.
• Experience with query planning or agentic reasoning loops.

Culture & Benefits

• Health coverage including medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources.
• 401(k) plan and equity award.
• Flexible time off and paid parental leave.
• Annual company retreat.
• WFH equipment stipend.