{"id":783870,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shifter-senior-solutions-engineer","title":"Senior Solutions Engineer","company":{"id":38666,"name":"Shifter","domain":"shifter.no","url":"https://alion.io/company/shifter","size_band":"1-10","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"BambooHR","truth_index":null},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Trondheim, Norway"],"countries":["NO"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":87000,"max_usd":203000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":1900},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Perplexity","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Vespa","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Solr","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":true},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"Jira","optional":true},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true},{"name":"Service Desk","optional":true},{"name":"Slack","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-09T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-09","last_verified_at":"2026-11-07T21:05:25Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":59,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":59},"description":"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 working directly with engineering teams at some of the world's largest companies to design, tune and scale AI search applications running on hundreds to thousands of nodes? If so, we want you to join our team at Vespa.ai as a Senior Solutions Engineer!\nAbout Vespa.ai:\nVespa.ai is a team of passionate builders. We maintain and develop the Apache 2.0 licensed open-source AI search platform Vespa.\nVespa 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.\nIn 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.\nAt 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.\nPosition overview\nOur largest customers and prospects run Vespa at a scale few systems reach: billions of documents, thousands of queries per second, clusters of hundreds to thousands of nodes. Getting there - and staying there - requires deep understanding of both Vespa and the customer's problem.\nWe are seeking a Senior Solutions Engineer to be the hands-on technical partner for these customers. You will help them design schemas and ranking, plan capacity, tune performance, and migrate from existing systems, from first proof of concept through production and growth. This is a role for someone who does the real work: you will build, benchmark, debug and tune alongside customer teams, not just draw architecture diagrams. You will also bring what you learn back to the Vespa engineering team to improve the product.\nAt 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. Since our customers are spread across the globe, the role requires some flexibility in working hours to meet with customer teams in other time zones, and will involve some travel to customer sites and industry events.\nResponsibilities\nAct as the primary technical counterpart for our largest customers and prospects.\nDesign and review Vespa application architectures: schemas, ranking, document and query processing, and cluster topology.\nPlan capacity and lead performance tuning and benchmarking efforts for large-scale deployments.\nRun proofs of concept and support migrations from other search and vector database systems.\nAssist in diagnosing and resolving complex production issues together with customers and the Vespa engineering team.\nFeed customer requirements and product gaps back into the Vespa roadmap.\nContribute to documentation, sample applications and technical content based on real-world experience.\nQualifications\nStrong programming skills in Java, Python or similar languages.\nSolid understanding of search, ranking or database internals, and of performance analysis on large systems.\nExperience working directly with external engineering teams or customers on technical solutions.\nExcellent communication skills, written and spoken.\nGood understanding of sound software engineering principles and practices.\nExcellent problem-solving and analytical skills.\nAbility to work independently and as part of a team.\nFluent written and spoken English. Norwegian is not required.\nDesired Skills\nExperience with building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.\nHands-on experience with Vespa, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Solr or a vector database.\nExperience with machine-learned ranking, embeddings or retrieval-augmented generation.\nExperience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).\nBackground in e-commerce, content or financial-services search and recommendation.\nSome of Our Tools and Services\nVespa and Vespa Cloud\nJava, Python\nAWS, GCP, and Azure\nGrafana, Jira Service Desk, Slack, GitHub\nWhy Join Us:\nOpportunities for professional growth and development as part of one of Europe's most exciting start-ups!\nBe part of a cutting-edge team working on innovative search and recommendation technology.\nWork 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!\nCompetitive salary and benefits.\nRelocating to Norway? We'll help you settle in, and offer voluntary Norwegian language training.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5185,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"Norwegian","level":"All levels","optional":false},{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT News & Tech Media"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-12T01:13:16Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":28,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.616,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":59,"expected_fill_days":31,"reasons":["conf:4","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-07T05:47:08Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/shifter-senior-solutions-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/shifter-senior-solutions-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-07T23:08:41Z","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":38409,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-08T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"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":38666},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=38666"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fshifter-senior-solutions-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"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%2Fshifter-senior-solutions-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"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%2Fshifter-senior-solutions-engineer"},{"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/shifter-senior-solutions-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fshifter-senior-solutions-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":783870}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"shifter.no","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":783870},"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. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}