Staff/Senior Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Search

Ironclad

. Build AI contracting capabilities at enterprise scale .

Posted 10/5/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • United StatesSenior💰 $188,000 - $270,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in building and optimizing AI contracting capabilities, focusing on search quality and content understanding. Proficient in architecting LLM and retrieval systems to enhance information retrieval and user experience.

Highest-signal resume keywords

10+ Years Building Production SystemsSearch Frameworks Experience (Elasticsearch, Solr, Vespa, OpenSearch)Fluency with Modern LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google)Experience in Query Understanding/NLU PipelinesTechnical Leadership and Mentoring

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

AI Contracting CapabilitiesInformation RetrievalContent UnderstandingLLM Models and PipelinesEvaluation Feedback MechanismsEmbedding SearchPost-Training AlgorithmsRAG SystemsBenchmarks and ExperimentsRelevance Tuning and Reranking

Soft Skills

AutonomyOwnershipTechnical LeadershipMentoringAdaptability

Industry Keywords

Search Quality StandardAgent AssistantConversational SearchDynamic EnvironmentStructured-Document-Heavy Domains

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

ElasticSearch

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Build AI contracting capabilities at enterprise scale
Own the architecture combining LLMs and retrieval systems to answer complex or ambiguous questions about customer contracts
Design and evolve agentic search systems that combine LLMs and retrieval
Design and run benchmarks and experiments to measure search quality
Use evaluation feedback to continuously improve search systems
Contribute to and influence the company's overall search quality standard
Own content understanding and ingestion
Turn raw documents into processed data consumable by retrieval systems
Build and use NLP/LLM models and pipelines
Define architectural decisions and technical direction for engineers across the AI organization
Partner with product, applied science, and engineering leaders
Deliver measurable improvements to search quality
Work on Agent Assistant, Conversational Search, and Content Understanding systems

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years building production systems
Substantial experience in search, information retrieval, content understanding, or recommendation systems at meaningful scale
Demonstrated depth in learned/hybrid retrieval, query understanding/NLU pipelines, or production LLM agent systems
Production experience with search frameworks such as Elasticsearch, Solr, Vespa, or OpenSearch, including relevance tuning and reranking
Experience with embedding search
Fluency with modern LLM APIs and multi-provider orchestration, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google
Ability to reason about token budgets, provider-specific tool-calling semantics, and prompt-caching trade-offs
Experience building eval-driven workflows, including offline benchmarks, regression detection, and structured A/B comparison
Strong autonomy, ownership, and technical leadership across teams
Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving architectural decisions
Comfortable operating in a dynamic, fast-paced, outcome-driven environment
Hands-on experience with post-training algorithms and infrastructure, including SFT and RL (great to have)
Experience with content understanding and/or information retrieval in structured-document-heavy domains (great to have)
Experience with RAG systems involving Google Docs, PDFs, DOCX, or other formats (great to have)

Benefits

Comp & perks

Equity awards, including a new hire grant and opportunities for additional awards throughout tenure
Competitive health and wellness benefits
Career growth and development
100% health coverage for employees (medical, dental, and vision)
75% coverage for dependents with buy-up plan options available
Gender-neutral parental leave
Compassionate leave
Family forming support through Maven for you and your partner
Paid time off
Monthly wellbeing stipend
Monthly hybrid work stipend
Monthly cell phone stipend, if applicable
Mental health support through Modern Health, including therapy, coaching, and digital tools
Pre-tax commuter benefits (US Employees)
401(k) plan with Fidelity with employer match (US Employees)
Regular team events
Opportunity to help build the company you want to work at
Bonus offered