Search Engineer, AI Infrastructure (SF/Toronto)

San Francisco. Posted a month ago

The role

You will own ranking quality and relevance for an LLM-driven search and retrieval product. You will design and build crawling, indexing, and retrieval systems while managing latency and cost.

What you will do

Own ranking quality and relevance for LLM-driven retrieval
Design and build the crawling, indexing, and retrieval systems
Push down latency and cost per query while search volume grows
Own services end to end: design, ship, monitor, and iterate in production
Work directly with the Head of Search and the rest of the search team on the roadmap

Required qualifications

3+ years of experience building and operating search or retrieval systems in production, with ranking and relevance as your primary, owned discipline
A specific example of a ranking or re-ranking change you personally owned, the search-quality or business metric it moved, and the numerical impact achieved
Hands-on information-retrieval depth across BM25 and lexical retrieval, semantic/vector retrieval, hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, retrieval evaluation, or RAG evaluation
Experience measuring search quality through relevance, recall, conversion, CTR, NDCG, MRR, query satisfaction, or comparable production metrics
End-to-end ownership of search services: you have designed, shipped, monitored, debugged, measured, and iterated on production systems
Strong backend systems programming skills in Go, Rust, Python, or a comparable language
Experience balancing relevance, latency, cost, correctness, and reliability under real production constraints
Comfort working through ambiguity, setting technical direction, and shipping quickly with a build-measure-iterate operating style

Benefits

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
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

Before you apply

not open to visa sponsorship
Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States or Canada
Paid Work Trial (~40 hours)

About the company

Lavendo partners with startups and high-growth companies to help them hire top-tier sales, GTM, and technical talent. The client builds the data layer that AI agents run on.