Search Engineer

Job Overview

We are seeking a Staff Search Engineer to join the Retrieval Engineering group s role is ideal for a deeply technical leader in information retrieval who thrives on designing large‑scale search systems, optimizing retrieval infrastructure, and advancing search quality across our cloud‑native platform. The Staff Search Engineer will define and evolve our retrieval architecture, shaping how we index, store, and surface data across billions of legal documents.

They will build next‑generation search capabilities that blend traditional IR with modern vector search and AI‑driven approaches.

• Architect, design, and optimize retrieval infrastructure at scale, including indexing pipelines, query execution frameworks, and storage layers.
• Lead the evolution from traditional inverted‑index search to hybrid retrieval systems that combine symbolic (BM25, learning‑to‑rank) and semantic (vector search, embeddings, RAG) approaches.
• Drive adoption of retrieval best practices: query understanding, ranking models, caching, index sharding, distributed execution, and relevance evaluation.
• Build fault‑tolerant ingestion and indexing pipelines leveraging event‑driven and micro‑batch architectures.
• Collaborate with AI/ML engineers to integrate LLM‑augmented retrieval, query expansion, re‑ranking, and feedback loops into production search flows.
• Partner with platform teams to ensure retrieval systems are observable, performant, and cost‑efficient across multi‑tenant Kubernetes clusters.
• Establish benchmarking and evaluation frameworks for precision, recall, latency, and query coverage, driving continuous improvement in retrieval quality.
• Contribute to strategic technical decisions that shape Relativity’s future search capabilities and ensure scalability.
• Incorporate knowledge‑graph‑driven retrieval by modeling legal entities, integrating graph queries with text/vector search, and applying KG features to improve ranking and explainability.
• Mentor engineers across teams, lead design reviews, and champion technical excellence in search and retrieval.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering with a significant focus on information retrieval systems at scale.
• Deep expertise in search engines and frameworks such as Elasticsearch, Solr, Lucene, Vespa, Open Search, or equivalent.
• Strong knowledge of retrieval models (BM25, vector similarity, hybrid retrieval, learning‑to‑rank, neural re‑ranking).
• Proven experience with distributed systems and storage, including index sharding, replication, and consistency trade‑offs.
• Strong programming skills in Java, C++, C#, Python, or Go, with experience in system‑level performance optimization.
• Proficiency with data processing frameworks (Spark, Flink, Kafka, Kinesis) for indexing and retrieval pipelines.
• Track key retrieval metrics such as accuracy, latency, and fallback rate.
• Experience operating retrieval systems in cloud‑native environments (Azure, AWS, or GCP), including Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD.

• Experience integrating vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, FAISS, or pgvector) into production retrieval systems.
• Familiarity with large‑scale machine learning for ranking: embeddings, transformers, reinforcement learning from user feedback.
• Understanding of privacy, compliance, and security requirements in enterprise search.
• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Open Telemetry) applied to retrieval systems.
• Experience with knowledge‑graph technologies (Neo4j, Janus Graph, Tiger Graph, RDF/SPARQL, Graph
  
  QL, or property graphs) and integration into hybrid retrieval systems.
• Familiarity with legal tech, e‑discovery, or enterprise SaaS search challenges.

• Competitive base salary in the range $174,000 to $262,000, depending on experience.
• Annual performance bonus and long‑term incentives.
• Health and retirement programs, wellness resources, discretionary time off, parental leave for primary and secondary caregivers.
• Two annual company breaks, home office stipend, and an equity program.
• Relativity is committed to competitive, fair, and equitable compensation practices.
• Relativity is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to an inclusive workplace.