Software Engineer, Retrieval

Why this job is exciting

The role:

Capacity builds a powerful customer experience automation platform, of which one of the core features is our agent orchestration layer. In order to ensure that those agents use correct and up-to-date information, we are improving our retrieval layer for surfacing relevant knowledge to them, and are looking for a Software Engineer to join our team and help improve the quality and responsiveness of our retrieval layer.

Responsibilities:

In this role, you will be responsible for the following: *

• Gather and generate data for evaluating and improving search quality and propose algorithm changes based on those evaluations
• Move prototype functionality to production
• Create and manage generative AI pipelines for improving search index quality
• Setup and maintain retrieval models and their infrastructure
• Implement feedback mechanisms to use user and agent interactions for improving retrieval quality
• Improve retrieval throughput and latency

Most importantly, you’re not afraid to ask for help and are proactive in offering it. You share your own knowledge and are always trying to learn what needs to be done to take things to the next level.

* Note that the listed responsibilities are not meant to be exhaustive; these represent just some of the anticipated duties and/or functional areas that you may be expected to perform along with other new tasks that may arise.

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience working in a software engineering environment. Able to use version control and project management software (git, JIRA)
• Experience with full-text search (ideally elasticsearch) and modern retrieval models (ideally Huggingface)
• Backend development
• Python, pytorch and dataframe processing libraries (pandas or polars)
• Experience with one modern statically typed programming language (e.g. Scala, Kotlin, Java, Go, Rust, C#, C++, Swift, TypeScript, Haskell). Our backend is written in Scala and Java
• Experience working with LLM APIs

Additional technical skills (preferred):

• Natural Language Processing
• Graph retrieval and knowledge graphs
• SQL
• Data cleanup and training data generation
• Backend web development
• Kubernetes
• ML Inference runtimes
• Apache Spark
• AI Coding tools such as Claude or Codex

You are motivated by:

• Hustle: You inspire others to work as hard as you. You will find a way, no matter how hard the task is.
• Ownership: You have an owner/builder mentality. You care about what you deliver and own your mistakes.
• Proactivity: You don’t wait for someone to tell you what to do or what problems to solve. You are always looking for ways to learn and improve.
• Excellence: You set a high bar and surpass expectations.  You hit your goals and ask for more.
• Humility: You are not above any task in the organization and are willing to drop what you’re doing to help a teammate. 

What you can expect from us

The team:

Capacity team members enjoy the opportunity and benefits of working at an artificial intelligence startup, but with leaders who’ve worked at places like Apple, Ebay, Visa, Answers.com, Oracle, Boeing, and many more world-class companies. The culture at Capacity encourages innovation, independent problem solving, and collaboration as we continue to mature our product in the ever-changing world of AI.

We provide:

• A supportive, diverse workplace where we prioritize respect for each other and our clients
• A fun and collaborative team culture

Salary range:

• The expected base salary for the Software Engineer, Retrieval role ranges from 85,000 to 90,000 CHF in Switzerland and 75,000 to 85,000 GBP in the United Kingdom; actual salary will be commensurate with a candidate's experience, skill and location.

Still unsure?

At Capacity we value more than just hard skills. Our goal is to build a holistic and diverse team. If you aren’t sure if you qualify, just apply! We will carefully consider your application and are always grateful for any time and effort invested in Capacity.  

But wait, there’s more!

At Capacity we believe in more than just building amazing products and helping our customers. Although we are a remote workforce, we remember the neighborhood where we started. We still strive to elevate our community by furthering access to education and careers in the tech space. Our affiliated nonprofit, Create A Loop, brings rigorous computer science courses to underserved communities with little to no access to formal computer science education. There are many opportunities for our Capacity team members to serve and educate our Create A Loop students throughout the year.