Staff/Principal Engineer, Search & Retrieval

What you'll do

• Set the architecture and provide technical leadership for the shared retrieval platform across teams.
• Build the scientific knowledge graph and combine graph, vector, and lexical retrieval into evidence-backed answers.
• Own ingestion, retrieval quality, evaluation, and agentic search workflows end to end.

What they ask for

• 8+ years of software development experience, including production ownership of a search, retrieval, RAG, or knowledge-graph system used by real users.
• Production semantic-search experience with embedding models, vector indexes (HNSW/IVF), hybrid lexical and vector retrieval, and reranking.
• Hands-on Python and modern backend framework experience; experience with cloud-native architectures including Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS.
• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field of study, or equivalent experience.

Nice to have

• Graph database experience; shipped RAG or semantic search in a regulated or enterprise context.
• Experience with permission-aware retrieval, scientific document understanding, agentic retrieval, scientific data platforms, domain-specific corpora, or knowledge-graph construction and retrieval.

Pay

$224,000 — $336,000 USD (base salary)

Tools

Python, FastAPI, async Python, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, HNSW/IVF

AI focus

Build RAG, semantic and agentic search, a scientific knowledge graph, retrieval evaluation, and cited answers linking scientific literature to experimental records.