Staff Engineer, Search

The role

You will build and run ranking, recommendation, and search systems for a digital jewellery marketplace. This involves owning the full lifecycle of ML models, from features and training to deployment and monitoring.

What you will do

• Build and operate search infrastructure like Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Vespa, or vector-search databases
• Design multi-tenant, configurable ranking and recommendation systems
• Build Contextual Search and a planned conversational assistant using prompt design and retrieval-augmented approaches
• Build image-to-attribute and image-to-product-match pipelines using image embeddings
• Design recovery paths and confirmation steps for probabilistic systems
• Define and run search- and ranking-specific evaluation including offline ranking metrics and interleaving experiments
• Evaluate and stress-test foundation model and LLM output
• Own the full lifecycle of ranking and recommendation models
• Design and optimize low-latency, real-time model-serving systems
• Use AI coding agents to build ML infrastructure and pipelines

Required qualifications

• 5-10 years of experience
• Information retrieval infrastructure experience building or operating real search systems
• Applied ML for ranking and recommendations end to end
• NLP and LLM application experience
• Low-latency serving experience building and optimizing real-time model-serving systems under production load
• Specialized evaluation skills for search and ranking quality
• Direct, hands-on experience building with foundation models and LLMs
• Experience designing for graceful failure in probabilistic systems
• Comfort using AI coding agents to build ML infrastructure and pipelines

Nice to have

• Computer vision fundamentals, specifically image embeddings
• Multi-tenant, configurable system design experience
• Experience building conversational or assistant-style search products
• Background in a marketplace or e-commerce company's search, ranking, or recommendations team

Benefits

• Flexible working hours
• Remote-first culture
• Real opportunities for growth and learning
• Unlimited holiday allowance
• The chance to join during an exponential expansion phase

Before you apply

• Please submit your CV in English
• Join the Nivoda Talent Pool and we'll reach out when something that's a better fit comes up

About the company

Nivoda is the operating system for the global jewellery industry, connecting diamond and gemstone suppliers directly with jewellery retailers. They are building a digital marketplace to replace manual, offline trading processes.