Senior Software Engineer, Search & Data

About the role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Search & Data team, you will own the end‑to‑end company and people search stack—including data ingestion, transformation, querying, ranking, and LLM‑powered search agents—while shaping long‑term architecture and building novel search capabilities.

About the company

Distill builds B2B outreach software that gives founders a “mini‑me” to conduct deep research and send human‑crafted messages, leveraging LLMs to turn cold outreach into conversations. Founded in 2024 by serial entrepreneurs Russ Heddleston and Tim Su, the remote‑first startup is backed by top‑tier VCs and focuses on usable, delightful products for end users.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with ownership of end‑to‑end search initiatives
• Hands‑on production experience with Elasticsearch or a similar engine (Lucene, Solr)
• Interest in search, data, and LLMs and how they intersect
• Exceptional problem‑solving skills and ability to ship quickly in a fast‑paced startup
• Ability to work independently and own a domain
• Experience with entity resolution and de‑duplication problems
• Strong UX and usability skills to create understandable search experiences
• Production experience with Postgres
• Production experience with vector search and semantic retrieval
• Proficiency in Node.js/TypeScript