Senior Software Engineer, Search

Vannevar is a defense technology company building AI to deter adversaries. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to drive innovation in search and information retrieval, working closely with ML and product teams to enhance their search system.

Responsibilities:

• Design and adapt the technical strategy for search within Vannevar’s products, including how we leverage full-text search, vector databases, LLMs, NLP, and relevance algorithms
• Improve both search latency and relevance
• Collaborate with product engineers, designers, and mission strategists to translate user needs into data-informed search innovations
• Research and apply emerging technologies, trends and best practices in the search/information retrieval domain to improve index quality, freshness, and retrieval performance

Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience in backend software development
• 3+ years in search, information retrieval, or related fields
• Passion for architecting, developing and deploying reliable, scalable, and performant systems
• Expertise in information retrieval, NLP, and machine learning
• Deep understanding of concepts like indexing, ranking, query parsing, tokenization, and vector search
• Hands-on experience with at least one major search engine (e.g., Elasticsearch, OpenSearch)
• Familiarity with search evaluation frameworks (e.g., precision, recall, NDCG)
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, leadership, and communication skills
• U.S. Person status is required as this position will require the ability to access U.S. only data systems