Senior Software Engineer - Data Search

Overview

This role is for a Senior Software Engineer specializing in Data Search, based in Ireland and offered on a contract basis with remote work. The position focuses on developing and enhancing a large-scale search experience used by thousands of businesses globally. The engineer will handle the full search stack, including data pipelines, indexing, retrieval, embeddings, relevance ranking, and low-latency serving.

Key Responsibilities

• Enhance creator discovery across vast datasets consisting of hundreds of millions of profiles and billions of media files by improving retrieval, filtering, ranking, relevance, and the overall search experience.
• Design and implement systems to generate and utilize multimodal embeddings from diverse data types such as images, video, text, and audio at scale.
• Develop new search features and transform experimental ideas into stable, production-ready systems while balancing search quality, latency, scalability, and cost.
• Own complex technical challenges end to end, encompassing requirements gathering, architectural design, coding, feature launch, outcome measurement, and iterative improvements.
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues affecting relevance and performance across data layers, query logic, retrieval, ranking models, and product decisions.
• Assess emerging models and technologies pragmatically, understanding trade-offs to improve search experiences meaningfully.
• Collaborate closely with data and product teams to introduce new datasets and search capabilities while ensuring data quality and adequate coverage.
• Contribute to strategic technical direction and system architecture, maintaining reliable, scalable, and maintainable production services.
• Share technical knowledge and insights with colleagues, fostering a culture of strong engineering practices and continuous improvement.

Qualifications and Experience

• Demonstrated expertise in creating large-scale search, backend, or data-driven products emphasizing volume, latency, reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency.
• Proven track record of carrying substantial technical projects from concept through deployment and iteration.
• Experience designing and managing distributed systems with a strong understanding of throughput, data flows, reliability, operational trade-offs, and failure modes.
• Professional experience deploying LLM-powered or agentic features in production, with insight into model capabilities, constraints, latency, and cost implications.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills with the ability to navigate ambiguous challenges independently by gathering context and clarifying requirements.
• Strong communication and teamwork abilities, capable of articulating complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Familiarity working in fast-paced product teams that ship incrementally, utilize data-driven learning, and adapt swiftly to changing priorities.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, or Node.js.
• Valuable experience with cloud platforms like AWS or GCP, modern data infrastructure, and orchestration tools.
• Experience or familiarity with Elasticsearch, vector databases, distributed data processing, infrastructure as code, or data orchestration is an advantage.
• Additional beneficial experience includes multimodal embeddings, semantic search, ranking algorithms, model deployment, GPU infrastructure, vector search technologies, and running self-hosted models.
• Interest in creator platforms, social media, or the creator economy is welcomed but not required.

Benefits and Compensation

• Competitive annual salary ranging from €100,000 to €130,000, adjusted based on location, employment type, skills, and experience.
• Substantial stock options grants offering meaningful equity as the company expands.
• Fully remote work within Europe, requiring some overlap with GMT+3 time zone.
• Flexible working hours emphasizing outcomes and impact over rigid schedules.
• Unlimited paid vacation allowing time for rest and rejuvenation.
• Support for personal development through funding for courses, books, conferences, and other professional growth resources.
• Significant technical ownership with opportunities to take search engineering challenges from concept to production without excessive procedural layers.
• Regular company offsites to encourage in-person connections while maintaining a remote-first workplace.
• An engineering culture that values productivity, focused collaboration, and protected time for deep work.
• A fast-paced environment with experienced peers and autonomy in decision-making.
• Modern technology stack including AWS, GCP, Pulumi, Python, TypeScript, Node.js, PySpark, Airflow, Milvus/Zilliz, Elasticsearch, Apache Iceberg, SageMaker, DynamoDB, S3, Glue, Kinesis, Lambda, ECS, and Aurora.
• An efficient hiring process typically completed within a week, involving conversations, coding, system design, team interviews, and culture fits.

Additional Information

This role is listed on behalf of a partner company who manages all applications and subsequent steps directly. The recruitment process uses an AI-driven matching system to ensure fair and rapid candidate evaluation. Final hiring decisions and interviews are managed internally by the partner organization.

Data Privacy: By applying, candidates consent to the processing of personal data in compliance with applicable laws including GDPR, with rights to access, rectify, erase, or object to their data processing. AI tools may assist in reviewing applications but do not replace human decision-making.