Senior Software Engineer (Search)

Awetomaton is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to support a new customer by building enterprise search and discovery capabilities that unify access across disparate artifact types. In this role, you will design and operate search and indexing systems that federate discovery across heterogeneous sources, apply modern retrieval and ranking techniques (including vector search and retrieval-augmented generation) to surface the right data to the right user, and tune relevance and performance at large scale. This is a chance to take enterprise search, information-retrieval, and applied-AI skills built in commercial settings and apply them to the highest-stakes data-discovery problems. 

We are looking for a candidate to start in the August 2026 timeframe. This position allows hybrid flexibility but will require weekly site visits and customer meetings in Dayton, OH. 

DoD Top Secret clearance is required. For highly qualified candidates, we will sponsor. 

Criteria for success 

• Communicate effectively in both written and verbal form with peers & decision makers 
• Demonstrate expertise in building enterprise search and retrieval systems (vector search, semantic search, RAG) across heterogeneous, multi-format data sources 
• Design indexing and retrieval architectures that maximize relevance, explainability of ranking decisions, and performance under real-time query load 
• Apply modern retrieval and ranking techniques (embeddings, vector search, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and entity resolution) to surface relevant results based on each user's role, access, and mission context
• Tenacity when tackling data access, permissions, and compliance requirements governing what each user can discover and retrieve 

Required Experience and Skills 

• BS degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field (or equivalent experience)
• 6+ years of experience building and operating search, information-retrieval, or discovery platforms at scale
• Hands-on experience with modern search technologies (e.g., Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or comparable) and vector/embedding-based retrieval (e.g., a vector database or vector search library)
• Experience applying ML/NLP techniques to search, ranking, or retrieval problems - semantic search, RAG, learning-to-rank, or relevance tuning
• Experience designing systems that unify discovery across multiple, heterogeneous data types (text, structured data, imagery/geospatial, or similar)
• U.S. citizenship required; must be eligible to obtain a U.S. Top Secret security clearance

Desired Education and Experience 

• Prior experience supporting DoW or IC programs 
• Experience with geospatial or GIS data formats and search (e.g., OGC standards, feature services)
• Experience with access-aware or attribute-based retrieval, where results are governed by a user's role, clearance, or permissions rather than pure personalization
• Familiarity with enterprise metadata management, data cataloging, or data governance
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD tools such as Gitlab CI and ArgoCD
• Familiarity with Agile development framework