SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 150,000 - 215,000 / annual
Vannevar Labs is a defense technology company building agentic AI systems to model adversary behavior, simulate campaigns, and recommend strategic actions to decision makers. The company has grown from $3M to $80M ARR in three years and achieved unicorn status.
As Senior Software Engineer for Search, you will drive innovation in search and information retrieval at the heart of Vannevar's flagship platform. You'll design and adapt technical strategy for search systems, working directly with ML, product, and mission strategy teams to surface mission-critical information for defense applications.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and evolve technical strategy for search, leveraging full-text search, vector databases, LLMs, NLP, and relevance algorithms
- Improve search latency and relevance performance
- Collaborate with product engineers, designers, and mission strategists to translate user needs into data-informed search innovations
- Research and apply emerging technologies and best practices in search and information retrieval to improve index quality, freshness, and retrieval performance
You bring 7+ years of backend software development experience with 3+ years specializing in search, information retrieval, or related fields. You have deep expertise in information retrieval, NLP, and machine learning, with hands-on experience with major search engines (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch) and search evaluation frameworks (precision, recall, NDCG). You understand indexing, ranking, query parsing, tokenization, and vector search. Strong analytical, problem-solving, leadership, and communication skills are essential. U.S. Person status is required due to access to U.S.-only data systems.
