Senior Software Engineer - Search

AlphaSense is a company that provides AI-driven market intelligence to help businesses make informed decisions. The role involves working on the search platform that powers market intelligence across billions of documents, focusing on building distributed systems that ensure high performance and reliability.

Responsibilities:

• Scale Distributed Systems: Architect and optimize infrastructure handling billions of documents and hundreds of queries per second
• Lead Platform Evolution: Drive the migration from legacy systems to modern architecture, ensuring zero downtime and improved performance
• Build Engineering Excellence: Establish comprehensive monitoring, testing, and deployment practices that catch issues before customers do
• Optimize Performance: Profile and tune systems from the infrastructure to the application level, balancing cost and performance

Requirements:

• 5+ years building and operating distributed systems in production
• Experience with large-scale data platforms or high-throughput systems
• Expertise in distributed systems fundamentals: sharding, replication, consistency, partition tolerance
• Strong performance optimization skills - you can profile, diagnose, and fix bottlenecks across the stack
• Experience with data pipeline architecture, real-time processing, or database internals
• Excellence in building observable systems with comprehensive monitoring and alerting
• Experience with search platforms (Vespa, Elasticsearch, Solr) or similar large-scale data systems
• Experience with Kubernetes, CRDs, and infrastructure as code
• Background in information retrieval, ranking systems, or recommendation engines
• Familiarity with hybrid search approaches (lexical and vector)
• Experience with JVM-based systems and tuning
• Knowledge of modern engineering practices from high-growth companies