Senior Software Engineer, Search & Recommendations
Otter.ai is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Search & Recommendations in Mountain View, United States. It pays $185k-$230k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Otter.ai.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this software engineer role: the job is building AI systems.
- Pay on this posting starts 10% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- The posting mentions RAG and NLP among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- Otter.ai has 19 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
The Opportunity
We're excited to welcome a talented and passionate Senior Software Engineer to join our highly skilled team. The ideal candidate will hold a deep comprehension of search and recommendations algorithms and infrastructure, including retrieval augmented generation (RAG), semantic search using embeddings, text indexing and retrieval, query understanding, various ranking algorithms etc.. In your crucial role, you'll be responsible for managing every aspect of our sophisticated enterprise search system, spearheading the design, development, and optimization of search system accuracy and performance.
Your Impact
- Design, develop, and oversee our enterprise search infrastructure, employing a mix of vector databases, full-text search engine, and relational database techniques.
- Understand the user's information needs by developing deep learning-based NLP algorithms to analyze, reformulate and suggest search queries effectively.
- Design, implement, and deploy various ranking algorithms to deliver the most relevant results with the best user experience.
- Evaluate and optimize algorithm accuracy by focusing on key metrics..
- Constantly track and analyze end-to-end system performance, leading improvement initiatives as required.
- Stay informed about the latest industry developments and emerging technologies, aligning our search system with, or advancing it beyond, the industry benchmarks.
We're looking for someone who
- Holds a Masters degree in Computer Science, or a relevant field, PhD a plus.
- 5+ years of experience in search, recommendation or question answering systems.
- In-depth knowledge of relevance measurement, tuning, and modeling.
- Engineering experience with large language models and RAG systems.
- Expertise in Python and/or C++.
- Exceptional problem-solving capabilities coupled with meticulous attention to detail.
- Outstanding communication skills to explain complex concepts convincingly to non-technical team members.
- Abilities to contribute individually while functioning effectively as part of a team.
- Familiarity with embedding-based search systems will be considered a major advantage.
About Otter.ai
We are in the business of shaping the future of work. Our mission is to make conversations more valuable.
With over 1B meetings transcribed, Otter.ai is the world’s leading tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. Using artificial intelligence, Otter generates real-time automated meeting notes, summaries, and other insights from in-person and virtual meetings - turning meetings into accessible, collaborative, and actionable data that can be shared across teams and organizations. The company is backed by early investors in Google, DeepMind, Zoom, and Tesla.
Otter.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We proudly celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive and accessible workplace. We provide reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants throughout the hiring process.
Accessibility & AccommodationsOtter.ai is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our hiring process. If you need assistance or an accommodation during any stage of the recruitment process, please contact hr@otter.ai at least 3 business days before your interview.
*Otter.ai does not accept unsolicited resumes from 3rd party recruitment agencies without a written agreement in place for permanent placements. Any resume or other candidate information submitted outside of established candidate submission guidelines (including through our website or via email to any Otter.ai employee) and without a written agreement otherwise will be deemed to be our sole property, and no fee will be paid should we hire the candidate.
Salary range
Salary Range: $185,000 to $230,000 USD per year
This salary range represents the low and high end of the estimated salary range for this position. The actual base salary offered for the role is dependent based on several factors. Our base salary is just one component of our comprehensive total rewards package.
#LI-Hybrid
How we rate this
Senior Software Engineer, Search & Recommendations at Otter.ai rates 92 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $185k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 10% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
- What NLP problem have you worked on, and how did you measure whether it actually worked?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
- Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: RAG and NLP. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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