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Harmonic is a startup discovery engine that helps investors, corporate development, and GTM teams at companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Brex, and Notion identify and evaluate breakout companies before they become obvious. The company is growing revenue at 100%+ annually and is backed by $30M from Craft, Floodgate, and Sozo Ventures.
The Discovery team sits at the core of Harmonic's product and data engine, responsible for searching, researching, analyzing, comparing, and evaluating across tens of millions of companies and hundreds of millions of operators. The team sources and ingests data from hundreds of fragmented and unstructured sources, transforming them into structured insights and searchable indices. Recently, they built an industry-leading agentic layer for startup search and research, unlocking new paradigms for VCs to automate critical tasks in sourcing and diligence workflows.
As a Staff Software Engineer - Search, you will architect the core intelligence behind Scout, Harmonic's sourcing engine. You'll own the end-to-end architecture from data ingestion to ranking, personalization, and model orchestration. Key responsibilities include:
- Designing scalable frameworks for retrieval, reranking, and LLM-driven evaluation to deliver highly personalized, high-quality results
- Creating architectural patterns that integrate Scout seamlessly with existing products to power repeatable sourcing workflows
- Leading agentic experimentation and evaluation, driving technical discovery for emerging technologies including memory systems, embedding models, and agentic frameworks
- Improving and extending evaluation pipelines to test new models and measure lift across product areas
- Shaping AI-native product experiences by partnering with Product and Design to define patterns that make LLM-powered sourcing intuitive and fast
- Translating ambiguous product goals into scalable technical designs that unblock new workflows
- Establishing best practices for building AI-first UX patterns, including agentic flows, async interactions, and structured outputs
- Providing architectural leadership across engineering by mentoring engineers, raising the bar for system design and documentation, and driving clarity in cross-team architecture
- Setting long-term technical direction for how the company builds AI-powered sourcing systems
You should have 7-8+ years of experience building distributed systems or large-scale backend architecture, with a proven track record designing and scaling search, recommendation, or ranking systems. You've led or heavily contributed to ML or LLM integrations in production and have strong experience with data-intensive systems, asynchronous processing, or event-driven architectures. You demonstrate technical leadership through mentoring, introducing frameworks, and influencing technical direction.
The team is composed of ex-founders and seasoned engineers from top institutions like Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Meta. The company is in the middle of a massive platform shift where AI and LLMs are transforming software, and they're building the playbooks for agentic product and user experience patterns, not waiting for them.
