Senior Software Engineer, Search

Vannevar is a defense technology company building AI to deter our adversaries. In the 21st century, conflict moves at algorithmic speed and foresight equals firepower. Our agentic AI is purpose-built to compete with China—from cross-Strait conflict to gray zone coercion. Trained on the most mission-relevant datasets in defense, our technology models adversary behavior, simulates campaigns, and recommends the best course of action to decision makers. Our AI systems are some of the most trusted in the industry and actively used on the front lines of the Indo-Pacific to keep the peace and save lives.

Exceptional technology starts with exceptional people. Vannevar is a small agile team combining world-class engineers with veteran strategists who bring deep expertise in defense and tradecraft. We’re building a company defined by mission impact, user empathy, and disciplined growth. In just three years, we grew from $3M to $80M in ARR, achieved early profitability, and reached unicorn status—proving that disruption doesn’t require an ego, and staying power doesn’t mean standing still.

Search is at the heart of Vannevar’s flagship product, Decrypt, and its business-critical use cases are expanding as we grow into new products. Our team owns the shared search platform—indexing, retrieval, and relevance primitives—that other teams build upon. We define the standards, APIs, and infrastructure that make high-performance, reliable search possible across a growing suite of products, and we operate this capability in demanding mission environments. 

You will be a technical leader driving innovation in search and information retrieval. You’ll work directly with our ML team to advance a state-of-the-art platform that integrates full-text search, vector retrieval, LLM-powered techniques, and relevance algorithms. You’ll translate requirements from dependent product teams into robust primitives and services, set and meet strict SLOs for relevance and latency, and shape the long-term strategy for how search enables Vannevar’s products to surface mission-critical information at scale. 

• Help craft a technical strategy for search at Vannevar, including how we leverage full-text search, vector databases, LLMs, NLP, and relevance algorithms
• Improve both search latency and relevance
• Partner with other engineers, product managers, and designers to identify and quickly deliver customer value
• Stay up to date with emerging technologies, trends, and best practices; particularly within the search/information retrieval domain 

• 8+ years of experience in backend software development for business-critical systems that are deployed in production environments
• You’ve successfully led the design or architecture of new and existing system(s), ideally within the search/information-retrieval domain 
• You have proficiency and experience working with search technologies, such as Lucene, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Vector Databases, NLP and LLMs 
• You have served as a senior engineer, or tech lead, and have demonstrated the ability to mentor and guide more junior engineers 
• You have a passion for building reliable and scalable systems, and understand how these systems interact with customer experiences 
• U.S. Person status is required as this position will require the ability to access U.S only data systems