About Weaviate

Weaviate is a remote-first tech start-up that thinks big and has a vector-based database at the forefront of database technology. It uses AI and machine learning to organize and search data in a completely new way. Weaviate is a vector database that enables companies to create meaningful insights from their unstructured data. With over 1.6 million downloads, Weaviate continues to grow in popularity.

Weaviate is a remote-first company. Our entire team works remotely across the globe because we believe in the freedom and flexibility to work from anywhere and at any time. Our people experience this as a massive benefit! Therefore we feel at ease with working independently, being proactive, and taking ownership of our work.

About this role

As an experienced Software Engineer, you will take the lead in designing, delivering, and optimizing the future of hybrid and sparse search in Weaviate. Your focus will be on enhancing Weaviate's sparse representations and inverted indices for achieving high performance with large scale datasets.

What your responsibilities will be

• Design and implement new sparse data structures in Weaviate for full text search including phrase search and autocomplete.
• Reduce the operating costs and improve the performance of Weaviate's text search capabilities.
• Improve the performance and efficiency of our search systems through low-level code optimizations.
• Deliver gradual improvements in an iterative fashion, constantly improving the product in areas related to search and information retrieval.
• Be a great team player by collaborating with your peers, learning from others, and sharing your expertise.

What we are looking for

• Very experienced search software engineer ideally with deep experience in Lucene, Anserini, Bleve, or other full text search libraries.
• Experience with Go or willingness to learn.
• Strong skills in algorithmic reasoning, probability, statistics, and text search algorithms.
• Great understanding of how search engines work under the hood and are familiar with concepts such as inverted indices, tokenization, and ranking algorithms like BM25.
• Quick learner, excited to dive into new topics related to search and information retrieval.
• You are aligned with our company values.

What we offer

• 100% remote with flexible work hours.
• Competitive compensation, including paid time off.
• Budget available to spend on going to conferences, co-working space, home office equipment, etc.
• Work with very experienced and fun team members.
• An atmosphere that encourages learning and personal growth, and that gives you lots of freedom, flexibility, and responsibilities.
• You will work at the forefront of search, ML/AI, and cloud-native technologies - and all of it is open source.