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

We teach computers science.

OUR WHY

We are building the brain behind the chemical industry. Chemistry touches nearly every aspect of our lives and the problem we're trying to solve has significant scope and magnitude and 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.

who we are

We are a fast growing VC-backed start-up bringing AI into the $5T chemical industry. We’re a unique team of engineers and scientists who are all motivated by a common mission to change how chemists work everyday. Despite being an early-stage startup, we have impressive traction and early signs of product market fit. We’re moving fast and have recently secured funding from investors, operators and angels that have backed the likes of Canva, Atlassian, Figma, Zoox and Robinhood.

Research Engineer, Search

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We teach
computers science.

We teach
computers science.

Join our team

We teach computers science.

Join our team.

We teach
computers science.