Senior Software Engineer - Search (Remote)

About the Role

AlphaSense is seeking a Senior Software Engineer - Search to join our dynamic team remotely. In this role, you will work on the search platform that powers market intelligence across billions of documents. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will tackle the challenge of building distributed systems that handle hundreds of queries per second with millisecond latency. This position 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Nice to Have

• 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.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary range of $140,000 - $180,000 per year.
• Fully remote work environment with flexible hours.
• Opportunities for professional growth and development.
• Work with a team of smart engineers eager to learn and innovate.
• Comprehensive health benefits and wellness programs.
• Equity options available for employees.

Join AlphaSense and 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. Your experience in building bulletproof systems will directly elevate the entire team's capabilities.