Senior Software Engineer — AI Agents / Search

ABOUT OUR CLIENT

Our client is a leading enterprise data platform company building an open, high-performance data lakehouse for AI and analytical workloads. The platform combines an intelligent SQL query engine, an AI-ready semantic layer, and an open catalog built on Apache Iceberg — enabling Fortune 500 companies across finance, energy, manufacturing, and logistics to unify, query, and govern data at massive scale across cloud and on-premise sources.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build and operate production AI agent and search services on top of a large-scale data platform. This is hands-on work at the intersection of distributed backend engineering and applied AI: multi-agent workflows, tool-execution infrastructure, retrieval and relevance, and integrations with multiple LLM providers — all running as real, customer-facing production services with the reliability expectations that implies.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design and implement scalable multi-agent workflows (including conversation state), tool-execution infrastructure, and data-aware tools working with catalogs, schemas, lineage, SQL, jobs, semantic metadata, data preparation, and visualizations
• Build search and retrieval capabilities with OpenSearch or equivalent — indexing, relevance tuning, hybrid keyword + vector search
• Integrate multiple LLM/model providers with secure configuration and graceful degradation
• Develop APIs and event contracts across REST, streaming/SSE, gRPC, protobuf, and SDKs, including UI integrations
• Operate, monitor, and improve production services — service health, logs, metrics, traces, search-cluster health, latency, and error rates; participate in the team's production-support model
• Investigate incidents, drive root-cause analysis, and ship durable fixes
• Design for permissions, tool approvals, multi-tenancy, and customer-data governance
• Maintain dependencies, apply security fixes, and reduce tech debt; produce designs, tests, runbooks, and documentation; lead technical discussions and review code

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience
• 7+ years of relevant experience, or equivalent demonstrated senior-level impact
• Strong Java software engineering skills
• Strong grasp of concurrency, data structures, API design, testing, maintainability, and backward compatibility
• Solid background in distributed systems, microservices, cloud services, or data-intensive backends
• Hands-on experience with search technologies — OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or Lucene — including vector search, embeddings, or relevance systems
• Experience building LLM applications, agent/tool workflows, RAG systems, or model-provider integrations
• Strong production instincts: diagnosing failures via logs, metrics, and traces; designing for fault tolerance, retries, cancellation, and recovery
• SQL and familiarity with data platform concepts: catalogs, metadata, schemas, governance, lineage
• Comfort leading ambiguous, cross-service work with clear stakeholder communication and strong written documentation
• Comfortable with AI-assisted development workflows — using modern AI tools productively while critically validating their output
• English Upper-Intermediate or higher (B2+) — daily written and verbal communication with a US-based engineering team
• Availability to work EU business hours shifted 2–3 hours later for daily overlap with US West Coast mornings

DESIRED SKILLS

• LangChain4j or similar agent frameworks
• Python for AI services, evaluation harnesses, or sandboxed execution
• React and TypeScript
• gRPC, protobuf, Quarkus, Kubernetes, MongoDB, KV stores, event-driven architectures
• Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, OpenLineage, semantic layers, or data-governance systems
• AI quality evaluation: LLM-as-judge, model benchmarking, production AI metrics
• OpenSearch operations: index lifecycle management, relevance tuning, incident response
• Open-source contributions

DETAILS

• Engagement: Long-term contract
• Location: Europe (EU / EEA / UK), remote
• Working hours: EU business hours, shifted 2–3 hours later for daily overlap with the US West Coast team