Senior Software Engineer, Search

About the Company

Vannevar is a defense technology company building AI to deter our adversaries. Our agentic AI is purpose-built to compete in high-stakes environments, modeling adversary behavior and recommending courses of action to decision makers.

Responsibilities

• Design and adapt the technical strategy for search, including full-text search, vector databases, LLMs, NLP, and relevance algorithms
• Improve search latency and relevance
• Collaborate with product engineers, designers, and mission strategists to translate user needs into search innovations
• Research and apply emerging technologies to improve index quality, freshness, and retrieval performance

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in backend software development
• 3+ years of experience in search or information retrieval
• Expertise in information retrieval, NLP, and machine learning
• Deep understanding of indexing, ranking, query parsing, tokenization, and vector search
• Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch
• Familiarity with search evaluation frameworks like precision, recall, and NDCG
• U.S. Person status required

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Remote friendly with WeWork access
• Unlimited PTO and company-wide off time
• 401(k) match
• Lifestyle and wellbeing stipends
• Salary top-up during military reserve duty
• Fully paid parental leave
• Child and pet care reimbursement during travel