Senior Software Engineer, Search & Discovery

Office Hours is an on-demand expert network connecting leading organizations with trusted experts across knowledge domains. Experts earn income through advisory work, projects, and AI model training. Our platform handles screening, compliance, scheduling, and payments, enabling focused knowledge sharing. We're a hyper-growth, profitable company expanding our expert network, offices, and products globally. Headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Brooklyn and Bangalore, we serve customers including digital health companies, technology firms, institutional investors, consulting firms, and AI labs. Backed by top marketplace investors, we aim to make human knowledge accessible and scalable.

About the Role

Matching experts with opportunities is core to our business, involving search, discovery, recommendations, ranking, and ontology. We seek a senior engineer to own this stack end-to-end, from data and indices to relevance, ranking, and user experience. This backend-leaning, full-stack role offers influence over architecture, product direction, and execution. You don’t need to be a search specialist initially—we want a strong senior generalist ready to deepen their expertise and own this domain as it grows.

Responsibilities

• Own search, discovery, and recommendations end-to-end, from underlying data and indices to relevance, ranking, and user-facing experience
• Build and improve backend services and APIs powering matching across our knowledge graph, focusing on precision, recall, and performance
• Turn fragmented, unstructured data into structured, searchable knowledge through reliable ingestion and indexing pipelines
• Ship user-facing search and discovery features across the stack, partnering with product and design
• Raise the bar on architecture, code quality, and observability as you scale this part of the platform
• Explore AI and LLM-assisted approaches to discovery (retrieval, embeddings, ranking, agentic workflows) and bring promising ones to production

Requirements

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with strong backend fundamentals and comfort across the stack
• Pride in craft and a track record of shipping high-quality products at scale
• Experience with search, discovery, recommendations, or data-intensive systems, with enough knowledge of relevance and ranking to make an immediate impact
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems into clean, scalable, well-tested engineering solutions
• Self-starter mindset, with a desire to own a domain end-to-end and grow deeper over time

Skills

Tech Stack:

• Back end: Node.js, TypeScript, MongoDB, OpenAPI, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Kibana, Sentry
• Workflow: GitHub, Slack, Notion, Figma, Amplitude, Storybook
• Front end (not required): React, Next.js, Tailwind

Bonus Experience:

• Deep experience with search relevance and ranking, including precision/recall tradeoffs, retrieval, and reranking
• Building recommendation systems or personalization at scale
• Familiarity with vector or semantic search (embeddings, HNSW/IVF, hybrid retrieval)
• Experience with knowledge graphs or entity resolution
• Integrating LLMs into search or discovery workflows in production
• Data-intensive, event-driven, or asynchronous processing systems

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k)
• Monthly wellness and fitness stipend
• Paid time off policy, plus company holidays
• Annual company off-sites (Tahoe, Mendocino, Mexico City, San Diego, Park City)
• Parent-friendly policies, remote flexibility, and paid family leave

Pay

Full-time offers include base salary, equity, and benefits. Pay range: $170,000–$220,000, based on seniority and relevant experience.

Schedule

This role is San Francisco-based preferred (2–3 days per week in office) and open to fully remote for the right candidate.