Senior Software Engineer on Search & Data at Distill

As a Senior Software Engineer on Search & Data at Distill, you'll own our company and people search end to end: how we ingest and transform data, how we query and rank it, and the search agents built on top. Search is fundamentally a data problem, and the quality of our profiles depends on finding and surfacing the right information. You'll have the autonomy to own this domain and build search features that don't exist anywhere else.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own company and people search end to end, from data ingestion and transformation through querying, ranking, and relevance.
• Improve the reliability and relevance of our existing search, with the freedom to rebuild it over time as you see fit.
• Design and build new search capabilities, like identifying high-growth companies, surfacing recent job changers, or matching precise company profiles.
• Work closely with the CTO and engineering team to make long-term architecture decisions about how search and data scale.
• Build search agents on top of our data, using LLMs to make results smarter and more useful.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with time spent owning or leading search initiatives end to end.
• Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch or a similar engine (Lucene, Solr) in production.
• Interest in search, data, and LLMs, and how they come together.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills and the ability to ship quickly in a fast-paced startup.
• Ability to work independently and own a domain.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with entity resolution and de-duplication problems.
• Strong UX and usability chops to build an understandable search experience.
• Experience working with Postgres in production.
• Experience with vector search and semantic retrieval in production.
• Proficiency in Node.js / TypeScript.

Why Join Us:

• A Proven Team: Tim and Russ have successfully built and sold multiple startups, including a $165M exit for DocSend.
• Immediate Impact: Be part of a small, growing startup and make a significant impact on our product and users.
• Build Cool Stuff: Work with cutting-edge technologies and solve challenging problems.
• Highly Technical Team: Work and think with world-class engineers.
• Collaborative Culture: Foster a collaborative, low-ego culture where the best idea wins. Assume good intent and be customer-focused, valuing diversity and creativity.
• Remote Team: Join a remote team with quarterly in-person meetups.
• Benefits: Health insurance, dental care, home office stipend, and coverage for in-person team meetups.