{"id":4260770,"url":"https://alion.io/job/guidepoint-senior-software-engineer-search-ai","title":"Senior Software Engineer - Search & AI","company":{"id":58600,"name":"Guidepoint","domain":"guidepoint.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/guidepoint","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":81,"open_postings":19,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.579,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":78,"computed_at":"2026-11-12T10:38:37Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Toronto, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"A/B Testing","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Azure AKS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Flask","optional":false},{"name":"Kibana","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Least Privilege","optional":false},{"name":"Logstash","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Pytest","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"JMeter","optional":true},{"name":"k6","optional":true},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":true},{"name":"PHP","optional":true},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-13T15:18:35Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-13","last_verified_at":"2026-11-13T15:22:27Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Overview: \nWe are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build and run the search systems that connect Guidepoint clients with the right experts. You will join the Search team in Data Engineering and own work end to end: Elasticsearch index design and cluster operations, the inference services behind semantic search, the Python services in front of it all, and the AI features that turn a plain-language question into a ranked list of people.\nOur search sits on the critical path of the business. When a client asks for experts, the quality and speed of what comes back decides whether a project starts. This role is for someone who cares about relevance as much as uptime, and who can explain why a result ranked where it did.\nThis role will be hybrid based in our Toronto office. \nWhat You'll Do:\nSearch and indexing\nDesign index mappings, analyzers, and tokenizers for expert, company, project, and lead data, including semantic_text and dense_vector fields\nWrite and tune queries: bool, function_score, nested, aggregations, kNN, and hybrid retrieval\nPlan and run reindexes, Painless data fixes, and alias cutovers with zero downtime (we recently retired Solr completely)\nBuild and maintain ingestion: Logstash JDBC pipelines and incremental change feeds from PostgreSQL and SQL Server, including tuning the source SQL when indexing slows down\nCluster operations and maintenance\nOperate Elastic Cloud deployments on Azure across prod, QA, and dev: sizing, shard allocation, ILM, snapshots, and version upgrades\nMonitor cluster health in Datadog and Kibana; tune heap, circuit breakers, and fetch sizes; diagnose shard and recovery problems with the _cat and _cluster APIs\nManage access: roles, service API keys and their rotation, least-privilege accounts for every consumer\nLead incident response for latency spikes, circuit breaker trips, and ingestion failures, then write the RCA and ship the follow-up fixes\nLoad test search under realistic traffic before major mapping, query, or capacity changes\nInference and AI services\nRun the inference layer behind semantic search: Elasticsearch inference endpoints, embedding models (ELSER, E5, or hosted models), ML node capacity, and cost\nBuild services that turn natural-language requests into structured search queries and filters using LLMs\nBuild and harden MCP servers that let AI agents call search as a tool: auth, consistent error contracts, lean payloads\nBenchmark LLMs for accuracy, latency, and cost against fixed query batteries, and pick models on evidence\nSet up offline relevance evaluation (judgment lists, nDCG, recall@k) and run A/B tests online\nPython services and APIs\nBuild and maintain the Python APIs and workers, running on AKS (Kubernetes), that sit between clients, AI agents, and the search cluster\nOwn services in production on AKS behind Azure APIM: tests, CI/CD, Docker images, Kubernetes deployments and scaling, dashboards, and alerts\nFix findings from security scans and keep secrets out of code and images\nReview code and raise the bar on design, testing, and readability across the team\nAcross the team\nTurn ambiguous product asks into technical designs and break them into deliverable pieces\nWrite design docs and runbooks that others can pick up without you in the room\nMentor engineers on search and backend practices\nWhat You Have:\n6+ years of professional software engineering, much of it building and running backend systems in production\nBachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology or related field\n Search engines, in depth (3+ years hands-on with Elasticsearch, Solr, or OpenSearch): mappings and analyzers, Query DSL, relevance tuning, aggregations, cluster sizing and operations, reindexing strategies. You've owned a cluster, not just queried one.\n Python: strong, idiomatic Python 3 (typing, async, packaging, pytest) and at least one web framework such as Flask or FastAPI\nSoftware fundamentals: data structures and algorithms, API design, concurrency, caching, and SQL. You test your code, profile before you optimize, and can reason about failure modes in distributed systems.\nAI in practice: you've shipped at least one feature that uses embeddings or LLMs, and you know the tradeoffs between lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval, including what it takes to run embedding inference in production\n Operational ownership: comfortable with Docker, Kubernetes (ideally AKS), CI/CD, and observability tooling; you've been on call, run a search cluster through upgrades and incidents, and written the RCA afterward\n Communication: clear written design docs and the ability to explain search behavior to non-engineers\nNice to Have:\nElastic certification (Certified Engineer) or deep experience with Elastic 8.x vector search, ELSER, or ES|QL\nMigrated a production workload from Solr or OpenSearch to Elasticsearch\nLearning-to-rank, cross-encoder rerankers, or relevance feedback loops\nBuilt RAG pipelines or LLM agents, including evaluation and guardrails\nLogstash, Kafka, or RabbitMQ for indexing pipelines; load testing with JMeter or k6\nAzure (AKS, ACR, Pipelines) and Datadog\nSome PHP or TypeScript, since a few of our consumers are written in them\nWhat We Offer: \nThe annual base salary range for this position is 135,000-155,000. Additionally, this position is eligible for an annual discretionary bonus based on performance.\nYou will also be eligible for the following benefits:\nPaid Time Off\nComprehensive benefits plan\nCompany RRSP Match\nDevelopment opportunities through the LinkedIn Learning platform\nAbout Guidepoint: \nGuidepoint powers end-to-end research workflows for the world’s best research teams.\nBacked by a global network of more than 2 million experts and over 1,600 employees, Guidepoint delivers real-time access to expertise, primary research, and actionable knowledge that help organizations make informed decisions. Through consultations, surveys, events, proprietary content, and AI-enabled tools, we support every stage of the decision-making process-from developing hypotheses and gathering insights to validating assumptions and building conviction for critical decisions.\nAt Guidepoint, our success relies on the diversity of our employees, experts, and clients, which enables us to foster meaningful connections and a broad range of perspectives. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment where individuals of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences can contribute and succeed.\nThis job posting is for an existing vacancy. The salary offered will be based on the successful candidate’s skills, experience, qualifications, and location.\nCompensation\n$135,000—$155,000 CAD","description_format":"text","description_chars":6664,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Market Research","Management Consulting"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-13T15:22:27Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":78,"reasons":["conf:1","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-13T16:34:45Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/guidepoint-senior-software-engineer-search-ai","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/guidepoint-senior-software-engineer-search-ai.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-13T16:34:45Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":33236,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-14T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":58600},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=58600"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fguidepoint-senior-software-engineer-search-ai"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"free","price":{"credits":0,"usd":0},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fguidepoint-senior-software-engineer-search-ai"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fguidepoint-senior-software-engineer-search-ai"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/guidepoint-senior-software-engineer-search-ai\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fguidepoint-senior-software-engineer-search-ai"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":4260770}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"guidepoint.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":4260770},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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