Software Engineer; Search & AI focus

Overview

Software Engineer (Search & AI focus)

Who are we? At Leadership Connect, we believe that relationships are everything in business and in life. Founded by two former CEOs of S&P 500 companies and a former presidential press secretary, our premier information service is built for developing relationships that impact decisions in government, business, and media. Utilizing deep research expertise and cutting-edge technology, we help our clients win business and influence policy across various specialties and verticals.

We are a close-knit team dedicated to helping each of our users make a difference.

Leadership Connect Canada (LCC), a subsidiary of Leadership Connect Inc., is our Canadian entity operating in the Quebec province. This opportunity requires an applicant to live and work within the Quebec province.

We are seeking a software engineer to make a major contribution to the development of our next-generation applications. In this role, you will help build a new semantic search and retrieval capability and integrate it into our production backend. Youll work end-to-end across components like indexing, retrieval/ranking, relevance iteration, and evaluation, collaborating closely with a small team to ship customer-facing improvements.

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs that power customer-facing applications.
• Build and product ionize search/retrieval capabilities (indexing, retrieval, ranking/relevance, evaluation).
• Collaborate across engineering and product to define requirements, iterate quickly, and deliver reliable releases.
• Participate in planning, design, development, testing, and deployment using Agile practices.
• Propose pragmatic solutions and improvements that directly influence product direction.

• 37 years of professional software engineering experience building backend or data-heavy systems.
• Strong backend fundamentals: API design, testing, debugging, performance, and operational thinking.
• Production experience in Python and at least one of Kotlin/Java (Kotlin preferred).
• Experience with a modern backend framework (e.g., Spring or equivalent) or demonstrated ability to ramp quickly in one.
• Search/retrieval experience is required: youve built or substantially contributed to a search/retrieval system (indexing pipelines, relevance tuning, Elasticsearch/Open Search, semantic retrieval, ranking, query parsing/understanding, etc.).
• Solid understanding of relational databases (Postgre
  
  SQL preferred), data modeling, and query patterns.
• Comfortable working in a small team with high ownership and ambiguous problems.

• Experience with Elasticsearch/Open Search in production (index design, analyzers, query tuning, performance, relevance).
• Experience with embeddings or vector search and relevance iteration/evaluation.
• Experience integrating LLMs into production applications.
• Familiarity with approaches like hybrid search and ranking signals.
• Go experience (or interest in learning).
• AWS + containerized deployment experience (Docker, ECS, CI/CD).
• Understanding of microservices and cross-service communication.

We foster an environment that encourages all our team members to excel by offering competitive compensation for top talent. We believe in creating a friendly and enjoyable workplace, with regular team-building events, happy hours, and more. Transparency is key within our company, and we hold monthly town halls led by our CEO to address questions regarding business plans, product direction, and company goals.

In addition, we provide flexible PTO policies to ensure you can enjoy your time outside the office and focus on your personal life.

Are you ready to join our dynamic team and build meaningful relationships that make a difference? Apply today!

• Awesome Extended Health Care Plan
• Dental Care
• Life & Disability insurance
• Health spending accounts
• Unlimited PTO!
• 12 Paid Holidays
• $3,000 Employee Referral Program
• Employer contribution to VRSP
• Rewards and recognition programs

If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet 100% of the requirements, we still want to hear…