Senior / Staff Software Engineer (Search)

Job description

Senior / Staff Software Engineer (Search)

Location: New York, NY (Full-time, on-site 5 days/week) Compensation: $190,000 – $220,000 base + competitive equity

Hiring: 1–2 candidates ASAP

The Role Greenfield opportunity to build search, recommendation, and knowledge systems from the ground up. Backend-leaning role focused on designing and scaling intelligent retrieval pipelines, data engineering, and AI-driven discovery across massive, messy document sets.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale backend services that power search, recommendations, and relevant data retrieval.

• Build and optimize data pipelines to ingest, normalize, and index large volumes of government and enterprise data.

• Create retrieval pipelines using embeddings to search and reason across thousands of documents (vector search, semantic retrieval).

• Solve entity resolution challenges across messy, real-world datasets — de-duplication, merging, cleaning, structuring.

• Own projects end-to-end: from technical design and implementation through deployment and iteration.

• Collaborate closely with product and engineering teams to deliver data-driven features.

Job requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.

• Experience building search systems, data pipelines, or recommendation systems at a startup (ideally Series B/C).

• Background in data science, information retrieval, or recommendation systems.

• Hands-on experience with embeddings, vector search, or RAG.

• Strong backend development expertise with TypeScript / Node.js .

• Comfort working with large, messy, real-world datasets.

• PhD or Master's in Machine Learning or related field (higher studies can offset some years of experience).

• Self-starter with an ownership mentality who thrives in a fast-paced startup environment.

• Must be a US Person per ITAR.

Traits to Avoid Candidates with no industry experience (purely academic PhDs); candidates siloed in one function at large tech companies.

Equal Employment Opportunity

TopTechTalent.ai believes that all persons are entitled to equal employment opportunities. TopTechTalent.ai recruits, hires, trains, promotes, disciplines and provides other conditions of employment without regard to a person's race, color, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, or expression, age, national origin, citizenship status, disability, veteran's status, sexual orientation, marital status or other classifications protected under law or Company policy. This includes providing reasonable accommodation for team members' disabilities or religious beliefs and practices.

The government requires TopTechTalent.ai to maintain information on those who seek employment with the company, including their race and sex. Accordingly, to help us comply with this requirement, we encourage you to provide us with the following self-identification information. However, submission of this information is voluntary and refusal to provide it will not affect your opportunity for employment or terms and conditions of employment, if hired. If you do submit this information, it will be kept confidential and will be used in the compilation of data for reporting requirements.

🚫 Third-party recruiters, please do not reach out for this role.

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