Senior/Staff Information Retrieval/Search Engineer

About the Role:

You.com is hiring a Senior/Staff Information Retrieval/Search Engineer to develop search infrastructure to power our AI experiences. This role, at the intersection of Generative AI (e.g. LLMs) and Information Retrieval/Search, is dedicated to researching, building, and deploying new product experiences using the latest advances in search, information retrieval, and AI that push the boundaries of what AI assistants can do.

Responsibilities:

• Develop the core you.com information retrieval/search infrastructure and the surrounding backend infrastructure.

• Drive the development of new projects from ideation to deployment. This includes deep expertise in large-scale infrastructure, crawling, indexing, ranking, retrieval, and evaluation of search systems.

• Ability to quickly iterate on a product based on user feedback in a rapidly changing environment.

Qualifications:

• Excellent programming and systems understanding

• Independently driven and holding themselves to very high standards

• Minimum of 4 years working on search/information retrieval projects 

• Passion for search/information retrieval (and staying up-to-date on the latest trends)

• Experience building, maintaining, and innovating production search systems

• Familiarity with lexical and semantic retrieval methods

• Deep understanding of the search stack from indexing to ranking, as well as the tradeoffs between cost, latency, and quality

Nice-to-have:

• BS/PhD/MS in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related areas

• Strong experience shipping and scaling search experiences to a large number of users

• Ability and a deep desire to work on search-specific problems as well as other core engineering / AI problems

About You.com:

With a deep foundation in search, You.com is truthful, accurate, and transparent and addresses hallucinations.

You.com was founded by leading AI research scientists Richard Socher and Bryan McCann. Richard was previously the Chief Scientist at Salesforce and is the third most-cited researcher in natural language processing (NLP) with over 170,000 citations. Bryan was a lead research scientist at Salesforce Research, specializing in deep learning and NLP. Over the years, Richard and Bryan’s collaborative research has had significant implications for NLP, particularly in word vectors, contextual vectors, and prompt engineering. Richard’s contributions were recently recognized with his inclusion in Time Magazine’s TIME100 AI list in 2023 as one of the “most influential people in AI” and the prestigious 2023 ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award for his influential research published in 2013.

Since its founding, You.com has transformed how people discover and engage with information online as an AI Assistant that helps people accomplish and solve everyday needs. Recognized as one of Fortune Magazine’s 50 AI Innovators for 2023 and featured in Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2022,” You.com has pioneered many solutions for Large Language Model (LLM) challenges, especially around trust and accuracy. You.com notably introduced the first consumer-facing LLM with access to the internet to provide up-to-date answers and include citations. You.com’s API further enables other LLM-based chatbots to improve their accuracy with real-time web access. You.com also emphasizes personalized AI chat experiences, offering tailored responses based on users’ backgrounds, interests, and preferences while respecting privacy and ensuring transparent control over personal data.

You.com is accessible on desktop, Chrome web extensions, iOS and Android apps, and WhatsApp.

Our Perks :

• A remote-first work environment with hubs in California, NYC, and Canada that offer monthly in-person gatherings

• Unlimited PTO with 11 U.S. holidays observed and a week shutdown in December to rest and recharge

• Competitive health insurance plan, where 100% of the policyholder is covered and 75% for dependents.

• 12 weeks of paid parental leave in the US; additional time off is also considered

• 401k program, 3% match coming January 2025 - no vesting period

• $500 work-from-home stipend to be used up to a year of your start date

• $1,200 / year Health & Wellness Allowance to support your personal goals

• In-person coworking weeks 1 to 2 times a year 

• Chance to collaborate with a team at the forefront of AI research

You.com is an inclusive, equitable and accessible workplace. If you require accommodation for any portion of the recruitment and hiring process, please let us know.