Senior Software Engineer (Search Intelligence and AI)
First seen by Alion on Oct 5, 2026.
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build data-intensive and AI-powered capabilities for a search and digital intelligence platform.
This role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, data engineering, search technologies and applied AI. You will work with large and diverse datasets, build reliable data pipelines and services, and develop AI-powered capabilities that turn complex data into useful insights and actions.
What You'll Work On
Design and build scalable backend services for data-intensive applications
Build and maintain pipelines for ingesting, processing, cleaning and normalising large datasets
Develop systems for analysing and retrieving information across structured and unstructured data
Build AI-powered features and agentic workflows using modern LLM technologies
Integrate with external APIs, data providers and third-party platforms
Design data models and storage architectures that support large-scale historical and analytical workloads
Improve system reliability, observability and performance as data volume grows
Work closely with product and domain specialists to translate real-world workflows into scalable software solutions
Evaluate new technologies and approaches in search, AI and data engineering
What We're Looking For
Strong engineering fundamentals
Strong backend engineering experience, preferably with Python or similar languages
Experience designing and operating production systems
Strong understanding of APIs, databases, distributed systems and asynchronous processing
Experience working with large datasets and data pipelines
Comfortable with data cleaning, transformation, deduplication and aggregation
Applied AI experience
Hands-on experience building production applications using LLMs
Experience with areas such as tool calling, structured outputs, RAG, AI agents or multi-step AI workflows
Understanding of how to evaluate, monitor and improve AI-powered systems
Able to distinguish between a prototype that works and a production system that can be trusted
Search & information systems
Experience in one or more of the following would be highly valuable:
Search engines or information retrieval
Web crawling or large-scale web data processing
Elasticsearch / OpenSearch or similar technologies
Search ranking, relevance or query analysis
Search-related APIs and datasets
Technical SEO or search analytics
Nice to Have
Experience working with digital marketing or search-related products
Familiarity with SEO and modern search behaviour
Experience with cloud data warehouses or analytical databases such as BigQuery, ClickHouse, Snowflake or similar
Experience building data products, analytics platforms or intelligence tools
Experience designing systems involving multiple AI agents, tools or workflows
Interest in how AI is changing the way people discover and retrieve information
What Success Looks Like
You are someone who can take an ambiguous data or intelligence problem, understand the underlying business requirement, and design a robust technical solution.
You should be comfortable moving between system architecture, data pipelines, backend development and applied AI, rather than specialising exclusively in one layer.
We value engineers who question assumptions, investigate problems deeply, take ownership of outcomes and can make pragmatic engineering decisions without over-engineering.
We are looking for someone capable of owning significant technical areas independently and helping shape engineering decisions as the platform evolves.