Senior Software Engineer, Search & Recommendations
At a glance
Senior Software Engineering role at otterai. Mountain View · $185,000–$230,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build and supervise enterprise search infrastructure that combines vector stores, full-text search and relational databases
- Use deep-learning NLP to identify user intent, reshape search queries and offer useful alternatives
- Create ranking methods, deploy them, and judge result quality against key accuracy measures
- Track performance across the full system and lead work to improve it
What you bring
- At least five years building search, recommendation or question-answering systems
- A master's in computer science or a related discipline; a doctorate is a plus
- Practical engineering work with LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation
- Strong Python or C++ skills and a solid grasp of relevance evaluation, tuning and modeling
Who this fits
This senior engineering role suits someone who can deliver work independently, collaborate with a team and explain technical ideas to nontechnical colleagues. The role is located in Mountain View.
From the employer
The Opportunity
We're excited to welcome a talented and passionate Senior Software Engineer to join our highly skilled team. The ideal candidate will hold a deep comprehension of search and recommendations algorithms and infrastructure, including retrieval augmented generation (RAG), semantic search using embeddings, text indexing and retrieval, query understanding, various ranking algorithms etc.. In your crucial role, you'll be responsible for managing every aspect of our sophisticated enterprise search system, spearheading the design, development, and optimization of search system accuracy and performance.
Your Impact
- Design, develop, and oversee our enterprise search infrastructure, employing a mix of vector databases, full-text search engine, and relational database techniques.
- Understand the user's information needs by developing deep learning-based NLP algorithms to analyze, reformulate and suggest search queries effectively.
- Design, implement, and deploy various ranking algorithms to deliver the most relevant results with the best user experience.
- Evaluate and optimize algorithm accuracy by focusing on key metrics..
- Constantly track and analyze end-to-end system performance, leading improvement initiatives as required.
- Stay informed about the latest industry developments and emerging technologies, aligning our search system with, or advancing it beyond, the industry benchmarks.
We're looking for someone who
- Holds a Masters degree in Computer Science, or a relevant field, PhD a plus.
- 5+ years of experience in search, recommendation or question answering systems.
- In-depth knowledge of relevance measurement, tuning, and modeling.
- Engineering experience with large language models and RAG systems.
- Expertise in Python and/or C++.
- Exceptional problem-solving capabilities coupled with meticulous attention to detail.
- Outstanding communication skills to explain complex concepts convincingly to non-technical team members.
- Abilities to contribute individually while functioning effectively as part of a team.
- Familiarity with embedding-based search systems will be considered a major advantage.
About Otter.ai
We are in the business of shaping the future of work. Our mission is to make conversations more valuable.
With over 1B meetings transcribed, Otter.ai is the world’s leading tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. Using artificial intelligence, Otter generates real-time automated meeting notes, summaries, and other insights from in-person and virtual meetings - turning meetings into accessible, collaborative, and actionable data that can be shared across teams and organizations. The company is backed by early investors in Google, DeepMind, Zoom, and Tesla.
Otter.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We proudly celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive and accessible workplace. We provide reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants throughout the hiring process.
Accessibility & AccommodationsOtter.ai is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our hiring process. If you need assistance or an accommodation during any stage of the recruitment process, please contact hr@otter.ai at least 3 business days before your interview.
*Otter.ai does not accept unsolicited resumes from 3rd party recruitment agencies without a written agreement in place for permanent placements. Any resume or other candidate information submitted outside of established candidate submission guidelines (including through our website or via email to any Otter.ai employee) and without a written agreement otherwise will be deemed to be our sole property, and no fee will be paid should we hire the candidate.
Salary range
Salary Range: $185,000 to $230,000 USD per year
This salary range represents the low and high end of the estimated salary range for this position. The actual base salary offered for the role is dependent based on several factors. Our base salary is just one component of our comprehensive total rewards package.
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