Search Engineer, AI Infrastructure

Lavendo

. Own ranking quality and relevance for LLM-driven search and retrieval .

Posted 9/24/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • United StatesMid-LevelSenior💰 $235,000 - $260,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in building and operating production search and retrieval systems, with a focus on ranking quality and relevance. Proficient in improving search performance through advanced retrieval techniques and managing large-scale corpus efficiently.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Production Search System OwnershipRanking and Reranking Impact MeasurementBackend Development in Go, Rust, or PythonInformation Retrieval Techniques (BM25, Semantic)Familiarity with Elasticsearch and Kubernetes

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Search System DevelopmentRanking AlgorithmsInformation RetrievalBackend DevelopmentDistributed Systems

Tools & Technologies

ElasticsearchLuceneRedisKafkaPostgreSQLKubernetesDockerAWSGCPGRPC

Industry Keywords

Search QualityRelevanceLatency ImprovementQuery Volume ManagementCorpus Management

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSDockerElasticSearchGoogle Cloud PlatformGRPCKafkaKubernetesPostgresPythonRedisRustGo

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own ranking quality and relevance for LLM-driven search and retrieval
Build and operate crawling, indexing, retrieval, and search-serving systems
Improve search quality using lexical, semantic, hybrid, and reranking approaches
Reduce latency and cost per query as query volume and corpus size grow while maintaining relevance, correctness, and reliability
Design, build, deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, measure, and iterate systems in production
Solve freshness, incremental indexing, deduplication, crawl scheduling, and large-scale corpus management
Work with the Head of Search and team to shape the roadmap and ship customer-facing improvements quickly

Requirements

What you’ll need

3+ years building and operating production search or retrieval systems, with direct ownership of ranking and relevance
Specific example of a ranking or reranking change owned and measurable impact on relevance, recall, conversion, CTR, NDCG, MRR, or a similar metric
Hands-on information-retrieval depth across BM25/lexical, semantic/vector, hybrid retrieval, reranking, and retrieval or RAG evaluation
Strong backend and distributed-systems skills in Go, Rust, Python, or a comparable language, with end-to-end production ownership
Experience improving latency and cost at meaningful query volume while maintaining quality and reliability
Familiarity with Lucene, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS/GCP, gRPC, or Protobuf
US citizenship or Green Card holder status
Must be authorized to work in the US without restrictions
Must not require current or future US visa sponsorship or transfer

Benefits

Comp & perks

Meaningful equity in a fast-growing, well-funded startup
100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision (50% for spouse and kids)
Employer-paid life, short-term, and long-term disability insurance
401(k)
Pre-tax FSA and commuter benefits
Pet insurance
15+ days PTO
12 weeks fully paid parental leave for moms and dads
$100/month wellness stipend
$1,000/year learning and development budget
3-month paid sabbatical after 4 years
Team offsites twice a year
SF HQ perks
Loaner e-bike for commuting