Applied AI Engineer

Does it sound interesting to work on an open source platform managing the data and real-time search and inference for some of the largest companies in the world? Would you thrive on following the fast-moving AI landscape closely and turning it into concrete capabilities - showing how the latest models and retrieval techniques work best on a production-grade AI search platform? If so, we want you to join our team at Vespa.ai as an Applied AI Engineer!

About Vespa.ai:

Vespa.ai is a team of passionate builders. We maintain and develop the Apache 2.0 licensed open-source AI search platform Vespa.

Vespa is a fully featured search engine and vector database. It supports vector search (ANN), lexical search, and structured data search, all in a single query. Integrated machine-learning model inference enables the application of AI to make sense of data in real time. Together with Vespa's proven scalability and high availability, this empowers to create production-ready search applications at any scale and with any combination of features. Our users and customers are #1 in e-commerce, content, and financial services globally, and are powering companies such as Perplexity, Spotify, Yahoo, Wix, and many more.

In addition to our open-source platform, Vespa.ai develops and runs Vespa Cloud, a robust SaaS offering that allows businesses to harness the power of our technology with ease.

At Vespa.ai, we are extremely focused on automating everything we do to grow fast and maintain high quality. In all roles, we scale through technology, not simply by adding larger teams. We take pride in being small, nimble, and the most productive.

Position overview

Vespa is used to build AI-driven applications at scale: semantic and hybrid search, retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation, and agentic retrieval. The models, techniques and frameworks in this space change monthly, and our platform needs to stay ahead of what users want to build with it.

We are seeking an Applied AI Engineer to be our expert on that landscape. This is not a research or model-training role. You will evaluate new models and techniques, integrate the relevant ones with Vespa, build reference applications and demonstrations, and drive improvements to the platform that make it a better foundation for AI applications. You will work primarily with the Vespa engineering team, and with customers and users where it helps you understand what people are actually trying to build.

At our Trondheim office, we work office-first: you will be based on-site most of the time, with the flexibility to work from home/remotely when needed, as agreed with your manager.

Responsibilities

• Track developments in embedding models, rerankers, LLMs, retrieval techniques and AI frameworks, and assess their relevance for Vespa and its users.
• Design and build integrations between Vespa and current models and frameworks (ONNX, Hugging Face, LLM APIs, agent frameworks).
• Build and maintain reference applications, benchmarks and demonstrations showing how to solve AI-driven problems with Vespa.
• Propose and prototype improvements to Vespa that make it more capable for AI workloads.
• Work with users and customers to understand how they combine Vespa and AI, and advise on effective approaches.
• Contribute technical content - sample apps, blog posts, documentation - based on this work.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software development experience.
• Strong programming skills in Python and Java, or one of them with willingness to work in the other.
• Solid practical understanding of modern AI/ML: embeddings, transformer models, LLMs, retrieval and ranking, and how to evaluate them.
• Experience running ML inference in production systems.
• Ability to explain technical concepts clearly to engineers and technical decision-makers.
• Good understanding of sound software engineering principles and practices.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
• Fluent written and spoken English. Norwegian is not required.

Desired Skills

• Hands-on experience with RAG, hybrid search or recommendation systems.
• Familiarity with ONNX, Hugging Face, LangChain/LlamaIndex or similar.
• Experience with search engines or vector databases.
• Contributions to open-source projects or public technical writing.

Some of Our Tools and Services

• Vespa and Vespa Cloud
• Python, Java
• ONNX, Hugging Face, PyTorch
• GitHub, Grafana, Slack

Why Join Us:

• Opportunities for professional growth and development as part of one of Europe's most exciting start-ups!
• Be part of a cutting-edge team working on innovative search and recommendation technology.
• Work on a team where we don't believe in silos between engineers; there aren't "developers", "ops people", and "sysadmins". We're all engineers solving problems the smart way together!
• Competitive salary and benefits.
• Relocating to Norway? We'll help you settle in, and offer voluntary Norwegian language training.