Back to jobs

Staff Software Engineer, Search & Retrieval Infrastructure

Remote

About Syllo 

Syllo is on a mission to transform litigation. Our product is a unified litigation platform that enables lawyers and paralegals to safely harness the power of language models and agentic AI throughout the litigation life cycle. Since going to market, we have gained a diverse group of enterprise customers, including some of the biggest law firms and corporations in the country, and we are quickly expanding. By reducing the expense of litigation industry-wide, we aim to improve access to high-quality representation and promote the alignment of legal outcomes with merit. 

 

About the Role 

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to take ownership of our advanced search, indexing, and data scanning infrastructure as we scale to the next echelon of data volume.

Our retrieval stack is robust and proven, but as our ingest sizes push into the multi-petabyte range, the complexity of balancing speed, availability, and cost increases exponentially. You will own this constellation of scaling challenges. Your mission is to continuously optimize and evolve our systems—ensuring our hot indexes maintain sub-second latency for interactive workflows, while simultaneously designing highly concurrent, cost-effective architectures for deep scanning and vectorizing massive volumes of cold-storage data. You will lead the design and implementation of sophisticated data tiering and retrieval strategies that keep our platform operating at peak performance without inflating cloud compute costs.

 

Responsibilities 

  • Scale the Retrieval Stack: Lead the optimization and architectural evolution of our existing hybrid search infrastructure, maximizing the throughput and efficiency of both lexical search (e.g., Elasticsearch, Lucene) and dense vector databases.
  • Advanced Data Tiering & Scanning: Design and implement intelligent, cost-effective tiering strategies across hot, warm, and cold data states. Evolve our distributed pipelines to efficiently execute asynchronous, massive-scale scans of petabytes of data in varying states of availability.
  • Relentless Optimization: Drive down latency and cost-to-serve. Deeply analyze system bottlenecks, tune indexing and querying algorithms, and optimize cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, and networking) for maximum efficiency at extreme scale.
  • Technical Leadership: Act as the domain expert and owner of the indexing and search ecosystem. Set the long-term technical vision for data storage and retrieval, guiding engineering teams on best practices for high-volume data modeling and performance tuning.
  • Resiliency at Scale: Ensure fault-tolerant, highly available operations during massive parallel ingest events and complex, concurrent querying across millions of documents.

 

Qualifications 

  • Extreme Scale Experience: 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record operating at the Staff/Principal level optimizing and scaling highly distributed, high-throughput systems to handle petabyte-level data.
  • Search & Vector Mastery: Deep, production-level expertise tuning and scaling Lucene-based search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr) and modern vector indexing infrastructure. You deeply understand index internals, chunking strategies, and embedding retrieval optimization.
  • Cost-Aware Architecture: A strong history of managing the compute vs. storage trade-off. You know how to design sophisticated cold-storage scanning solutions and hot-index architectures that are highly performant but fundamentally cost-effective.
  • Distributed Systems: Extensive experience managing complex data pipelines, high-throughput event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis), and distributed compute architectures handling billions of records.
  • Cloud Infrastructure: Expert command of cloud primitives (GCP preferred), Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code.
  • Languages: Expert-level proficiency in systems-level and backend languages (Go, Rust, Python, or Java/C++).

Salary Range ($190- $230K) plus health insurance and equity. 

United States - Remote Pay Range

$190,000 - $230,000 USD

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV*

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Cover Letter

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Education

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in TLA Tech ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 07/31/2029

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.