Member of Technical Staff, Retrieval & Indexing
At a glance
Senior Software Engineering role at Parallel Web Systems. San Francisco · full-time · $150,000–$300,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build and run the systems behind a large-scale full-text web index
- Choose what enters the collection, then create structures that make it searchable
- Develop signals and models to assess source quality and how recently pages were updated
- Serve index queries with low latency and controlled cost
- Spot capacity constraints early and evolve the architecture as demand grows
What you bring
- A bachelor's degree or equivalent education, training, and professional experience
- Relevant preparation in the field through coursework, training, or hands-on professional work
- Strong grounding in information retrieval, distributed systems, and performance optimization
Who this fits
This senior role suits you if you enjoy balancing classical and neural retrieval with cost, reliability, and speed. The team works in person at either its Palo Alto headquarters or San Francisco office.
From the employer
About us
Parallel is a web infrastructure company. Our products are used by leading businesses in sales, marketing, insurance, and coding to build best-in-class AI agents with flexible and powerful programmatic access to the web.
We've raised $230 million from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, First Round, and Terrain to build the web for AIs. We're currently valued at $2 billion and we're forming a world-class team of engineers, designers, marketers, sellers, researchers, and operational experts to achieve our mission.
The role:
You will build and operate the systems that let Parallel run its own large-scale full-text index over the web. You will work across the full lifecycle: deciding what belongs in the corpus, building the searchable structures that hold it, building the signals and models that judge source quality and freshness, and serving queries against the index quickly and economically. You will anticipate bottlenecks before they appear and ensure the architecture evolves to meet increasing demand.
About you:
Have deep intuition on information retrieval, distributed systems, and performance tuning. You like to reason about the trade-offs between classical and neural retrieval, and between cost, reliability, and latency. You care about your work helping agents find the right information, and about infrastructure that can support products used by millions without breaking a sweat.
You might be a good fit if you have:
Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and professional experience
A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
Years of experience required will correlated with the internal job level requirements for this position
Life at Parallel
Our team works fully in-person, between our Palo Alto HQ and San Francisco office. We’re a flat, talent-dense organization dedicated to solving technical and creative problems.
We seek like-minded individuals who share our passion for applying science, creativity, and consistency to big and complex problems with equally big outcomes. These are our values:
Own customer impact: It’s on us to ensure real-world outcomes for our customers.
Obsess over craft: Perfect every detail because quality compounds.
Accelerate change: Ship fast, adapt faster, and move frontier ideas into production.
Create win-wins: Creatively turn trade-offs into upside.
Make high-conviction bets: Try and fail. But succeed an unfair amount.
Compensation & benefits
Competitive salary
Generous equity
Visa sponsorships
401K plans
Daily lunch & office snacks
Dinner at the office
Unlimited vacation
Caltrain pass reimbursement
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