Senior Software Engineer, Search
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 18, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 28, 2026. Vannevar Labs scores A on the Alion truth index.
Vannevar builds AI systems for the Department of War's most consequential missions. We have 125 deployments across every branch and combatant command spanning our core platform and five distinct products. An an example of how we work, when major combat operations started with Iran, we fielded a new product supporting 24/7 operations and 9,000+ users in three months.
How we build is our advantage: we deploy forward with the people who own the mission. Our engineers, product team, and CTO deploy forward to the point of friction, including visiting units in Ukraine. We focus on embedding directly with operational units supporting great power competition with China, combat operations with Iran, and counter-narcotics missions.
About the role
Search is at the heart of Vannevar’s flagship platform and agentic workflows. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer, with substantial knowledge and passion for search and information retrieval, to drive innovation in this space. In this role, you will work directly with our ML and product teams to advance a state-of-the-art search system that fundamentally drives our users’ ability to surface mission critical information.
What you'll do
- Design and adapt the technical strategy for search within Vannevar’s products, including how we leverage full-text search, vector databases, LLMs, NLP, and relevance algorithms
- Improve both search latency and relevance
- Collaborate with product engineers, designers, and mission strategists to translate user needs into data-informed search innovations
- Research and apply emerging technologies, trends and best practices in the search/information retrieval domain to improve index quality, freshness, and retrieval performance
What we’re looking for
- You have 7+ years of experience in backend software development, with 3+ years in search, information retrieval, or related fields
- You have a passion for architecting, developing and deploying reliable, scalable, and performant systems
- You have expertise in information retrieval, NLP, and machine learning. You have a deep understanding of concepts like indexing, ranking, query parsing, tokenization, and vector search.
- You have hands-on experience with at least one major search engine (e.g., Elasticsearch, OpenSearch), and familiarity with search evaluation frameworks (e.g., precision, recall, NDCG).
- You have excellent analytical, problem-solving, leadership, and communication skills.
- U.S. Person status is required as this position will require the ability to access U.S. only data systems.
What we offer
Competitive Salary
The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $215,000 + equity. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, relevant education, and/or training.
Comprehensive Benefits
We’re proud to offer competitive benefits that support our employees. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- Remote friendly with WeWork access
- Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year
- 401(k) match
- Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends
- Salary top-up during military reserve duty
- Fully paid parental leave
- Child and pet care reimbursement during travel
Vannevar is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.
We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, even if you don't feel like you're a perfect fit. If you're passionate about contributing to our mission, we'd love to hear from you!
IMPORTANT NOTICE
We are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @vannevarlabs.com domain. Under no circumstances will a legitimate representative from our company contact you to request passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data. Please be vigilant of potential scams.