Senior Software Engineer (Search)

About the role

Own search at Cortea. You'll design and ship retrieval, ranking, and evaluation systems that power our AI agents. You'll also build the data pipelines behind them.

What you'll do

• Build and tune retrieval and ranking: lexical + neural
• Own evaluation: datasets, metrics, dashboards, and regressions
• Design data pipelines for ingestion, enrichment, and classification
• Ship production code: Python services, APIs, SQL models, tests
• Improve relevance through experimentation and systematic analysis

What you'll need

• 5+ years as a software engineer or applied scientist with hands-on information retrieval work
• IR fundamentals: BM25, TF-IDF, and neural retrieval
• Evaluation: comfortable with NDCG, MRR, Precision@K and when to use each
• Data & software: Python (asyncio, type hints, pandas) and strong SQL (modeling, window functions, CTEs, optimization)
• Production APIs: design, implementation, and maintenance

Nice to have

• Ranking systems: learning-to-rank, re-ranking, relevance tuning
• Distributed compute / orchestration: Spark, Ray, or Temporal
• Search engines: Elasticsearch / OpenSearch at scale
• Warehouses: BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar
• Post-training LMs for retrieval/ranking
• Data engineering experience

What they offer

• High impact & growth: Shape strategy at a scaling AI startup from day one
• €80-€120k salary plus significant equity
• Learning budget for courses and conferences
• Flexible vacation, team lunches, retreats, central Berlin office