ML Engineer in Search

Vectara is on a mission to provide a scalable platform for neural information retrieval, helping our customers build advanced language understanding into the next generation of software systems. Our stellar team includes CEO Amr Awadallah, cofounder of Cloudera, experts in neural IR, distributed database systems, and search platforms from organizations including Google, Google Research, Elasticsearch, Databricks, and Twilio.

This position is with Vectara’s machine learning team. You’ll be a good fit if:

1. You have a passion for working on development of a modern search platform.

2. You have extensive prior industry experience in search. Hands-on experience with machine learning techniques is mandatory, preferably including deep neural methods.

3. Excited about working in a collaborative team setting.

4. You are open to living and working in Silicon Valley. While we support working from home, you should be open to the idea of working as a team in our office in Palo Alto, California three days a week.

Come help us build the future of information retrieval!

Ideal candidates will have expertise in one or more of the following areas

• Search evaluation.
• Design of dual-encoder models for information retrieval.
• Search ranking techniques, including cross-attentional rerankers and adaptive rerankers (e.g. LambdaMART)
• Statistical calibration techniques, especially for deep neural networks.
• Experience developing large-scale commercial search systems.
• Neural approaches to Open domain QA and Zero-shot IR.
• Familiarity with sparse and dense IR methods.
• Machine learning techniques, including, but not limited to, deep learning.

The following are plusses, but not required:

• Vector databases, including performance measurement and tuning.
• Published research.

Vectara welcomes all. We value the collective wisdom of people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We never discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. Vectara has a positive and supportive culture—we look for people who are inventive and work to be a little better every single day. We seek to be smart, humble, hardworking, and curious. After all, we are on a mission to find meaning.

Perks and Benefits:

100% paid Medical, Dental, Vision begins on your first day! Option of Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Savings Account (FSA). Generous paid time off (PTO) plus paid sick time, holidays, and company rest days. Professional development and training opportunities. Company virtual happy hours and fun team building activities and more.