Research Engineer, Search
Build intelligent search systems that make scientific and chemical data instantly useful. You’ll design and deploy state-of-the-art retrieval pipelines combining embeddings, metadata, and domain-specific ranking logic.
Responsibilities
- Develop semantic and hybrid search pipelines tailored to scientific and chemical domains
- Work with embeddings, vector databases, and scoring algorithms to improve relevance and precision
- Integrate metadata filters, ontologies, and ranking signals into search systems
- Collaborate with NLP, infra, and product teams to deploy search in real user-facing features
- Continuously benchmark and optimise retrieval performance across datasets
- Evaluate new techniques in search, indexing, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
technical requirements
- Strong experience with vector search, embeddings, and similarity metrics
- Familiarity with tools like FAISS, Weaviate, Qdrant, Elasticsearch, or similar
- Proficient in Python and ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, Hugging Face)
- Experience implementing RAG or semantic search in production
- (Bonus) Background in ranking algorithms, MLOps, or graph-based retrieval
- (Bonus) Domain exposure to chemical or scientific datasets
personal attributes
- Obsessive about search quality and user experience
- Analytical thinker with strong debugging and optimisation skills
- Comfortable owning systems end-to-end - from research to deployment
- Quick to learn and adapt to complex data and evolving requirements
- Collaborative and pragmatic - willing to test, fail, and iterate fast
what you’ll get
- Build critical infrastructure powering knowledge access in science
- High leverage role with direct user and product impact
- Fast-paced environment focused on iteration and shipping
- Remote-first with flexible hours and optional Sydney office
- Collaborate with engineers, scientists, and founders at the cutting edge
- Opportunity to work on a technically rich, high-value problem space
NOTES
Join our team
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We teach
computers science.
OUR WHY
We are building chemistry-specific intelligence. Chemistry touches nearly every aspect of our lives and the problem we're trying to solve has significant scope and magnitude. It will directly affect people's lives for the better if we're successful. We are doing something that has never been done before - operating at a unique intersection of the physical and digital world.
