Senior Platform Engineer - Search

AlphaSense is seeking an experienced engineer to work on the search platform that powers market intelligence across billions of documents. You’ll tackle the challenge of building distributed systems that handle hundreds of queries per second with millisecond latency, while establishing engineering excellence that ensures reliability for our enterprise customers.

This role is perfect for a seasoned engineer who loves challenges and has a track record of building robust, high-performance systems. While search experience is valuable, we believe great engineers can master new domains – what matters most is your ability to build systems that scale and don’t break.

What You’ll Do

• Scale Distributed Systems: Architect and optimize infrastructure handling billions of documents and hundreds of queries per second
• Lead Platform Evolution: Drive the migration from legacy systems to modern architecture, ensuring zero downtime and improved performance
• Build Engineering Excellence: Establish comprehensive monitoring, testing, and deployment practices that catch issues before customers do
• Optimize Performance: Profile and tune systems from the infrastructure to the application level, balancing cost and performance

What We’re Looking For

Required:

• 5+ years building and operating distributed systems in production
• Experience with large-scale data platforms or high-throughput systems
• Expertise in distributed systems fundamentals: sharding, replication, consistency, partition tolerance
• Strong performance optimization skills - you can profile, diagnose, and fix bottlenecks across the stack
• Experience with data pipeline architecture, real-time processing, or database internals
• Excellence in building observable systems with comprehensive monitoring and alerting

Preferred:

• Experience with search platforms (Vespa, Elasticsearch, Solr) or similar large-scale data systems
• Experience with Kubernetes, CRDs, and infrastructure as code
• Background in information retrieval, ranking systems, or recommendation engines
• Familiarity with hybrid search approaches (lexical and vector)
• Experience with JVM-based systems and tuning
• Knowledge of modern engineering practices from high-growth companies

Why This Role is Unique

You’ll own a critical platform that directly impacts how customers discover insights. This isn’t just about maintaining a search system – it’s about building the next generation of information retrieval at scale. You’ll work with modern technologies (including hybrid lexical/vector search), but more importantly, you’ll apply your distributed systems expertise to solve fascinating scale challenges.

The best part? You’ll join a team of smart engineers who are eager to learn. Your experience in building bulletproof systems will directly elevate the entire team’s capabilities.

Impact You’ll Have

Within your first year, you’ll transform our search infrastructure from reactive to proactive, reduce latency, complete a major platform migration, and build systems that scale effortlessly with our growth. Most importantly, you’ll establish engineering practices that ensure we never hear about customer issues first.