Senior Software Engineer, Search & Data

About Distill

Distill gives every founder and executive a "mini-me" that does outreach for them. Customers would rather hear from founders than salespeople, but founders don't have the time. Distill does it for them: deep research on each person, tight and human messages that get industry-leading response rates, turning cold outreach into real conversations.

Distill is backed by top tier VCs (funding has yet to be announced) and was founded in 2024 by Russ Heddleston and Tim Su. Both are multi-time founders with exits under their belts who love building usable, delightful B2B software that targets the end user. Tim previously started and sold a todo app called Astrid to Yahoo! and then went on to start Tandem, a remote work communication tool backed by a16z. Russ previously started and sold Pursuit.com to Meta and then started and sold DocSend to Dropbox.

Distill is a remote-first team as Tim is happily settled in Mountain View and Russ is up in Whistler. Come join as we make use of LLMs to create delightful B2B software that end users love!

Role Overview:

As a Senior Software Engineer on Search & Data at Distill, you'll own our company and people search end to end: how we ingest and transform data, how we query and rank it, and the search agents built on top. Search is fundamentally a data problem, and the quality of our profiles depends on finding and surfacing the right information. You'll have the autonomy to own this domain and build search features that don't exist anywhere else.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own company and people search end to end, from data ingestion and transformation through querying, ranking, and relevance

• Pick up where we left off, improving the reliability and relevance of our existing search, with the freedom to rebuild it over time as you see fit

• Design and build new search capabilities, like identifying high-growth companies, surfacing recent job changers, or matching precise company profiles

• Work closely with the CTO and engineering team to make long-term architecture decisions about how search and data scale

• Build search agents on top of our data, using LLMs to make results smarter and more useful

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with time spent owning or leading search initiatives end to end

• Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch or a similar engine (Lucene, Solr) in production

• Interest in search, data, and LLMs, and how they come together

• Exceptional problem-solving skills and the ability to ship quickly in a fast-paced startup

• Ability to work independently and own a domain

Nice to Have:

• Experience with entity resolution and de-duplication problems

• Strong UX and usability chops to build an understandable search experience

• Experience working with Postgres in production

• Experience with vector search and semantic retrieval in production

• Proficiency in Node.js / TypeScript

Why Join Us:

• A Proven Team: Tim and Russ have successfully built and sold multiple startups. Tim built and sold Astrid to Yahoo!. Russ most recently built and sold DocSend to Dropbox for $165m. Before that he started and sold Pursuit to Meta. They've done this before and are excited to do it again.

• Immediate Impact: Be part of a small, growing startup and make a significant impact on our product and users.

• Build Cool Stuff: Work with cutting-edge technologies and solve challenging problems.

• Highly Technical Team: Work and think with world-class engineers

• Collaborative Culture: At Distill, we foster a collaborative, low-ego culture where the best idea wins. We assume good intent and are customer-focused, valuing diversity and creativity.

• Remote Team: Join a remote team that collaborates through a variety of online tools, with quarterly in-person meetups. Many of us are parents who understand the need for flexibility.

• Benefits: We offer health insurance, dental care, a home office stipend, and cover expenses for in-person team meetups.