Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Index (AI)

Location: Sunnyvale, California, USA; hybrid

Salary: $311,850–$350,625 per year, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global develops AI-powered autonomous driving technology and large-scale systems for processing driving data.

What you will do

• Build and operate production search and indexing systems at billion-vector scale.
• Apply and evaluate embedding models for semantic and multimodal retrieval, including inference, normalization, versioning, and integration.
• Develop evaluation frameworks covering retrieval quality, recall, relevance, filtering accuracy, latency, freshness, scalability, and cost.
• Build backend services and APIs for vector similarity and metadata-filtered search.
• Own search components from design and implementation through deployment and production operations.
• Collaborate with ML, Data, and Evaluation teams and mentor engineers through reviews, guidance, and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or ML systems, building production systems.
• Experience with vector databases or approximate nearest-neighbor technologies such as FAISS, LanceDB, or similar open-source solutions.
• Strong understanding of multimodal embeddings and experience evaluating search quality, relevance, recall, filtering accuracy, and performance.
• Strong coding skills in Python or other systems languages.
• Experience building search services, APIs, and large-scale ingestion and indexing pipelines.
• Experience delivering 0-to-1 systems in ambiguous or exploratory problem spaces and working across infrastructure, ML, and data-curation boundaries.

Nice to have

• Experience with large-scale ML pipelines or distributed data infrastructure.
• Familiarity with multimodal video, image, sensor, and metadata datasets.
• Exposure to active learning, semantic retrieval, or training-data selection workflows.
• Experience in autonomy, robotics, or large-scale data infrastructure.
• Experience evaluating technical vendors and working with external technology providers.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work based in Sunnyvale, California.
• Opportunity to work on high-scale search infrastructure supporting data curation, training, and ML research.
• Competitive equity package.
• Pragmatic, fast-moving environment focused on delivering an MVP in months rather than quarters.