Senior Software Engineer (Java) — AI Agents and Search

About Our Client:
Our client is a leading enterprise data platform company building an open, high-performance data lakehouse for AI and analytical workloads. The platform combines an intelligent SQL query engine, an AI-ready semantic layer, and an open catalog built on Apache Iceberg — enabling Fortune 500 companies across finance, energy, manufacturing, and logistics to unify, query, and govern data at massive scale across cloud and on-premise sources.

About the Role:
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build and operate production AI agent and search services on top of a large-scale data platform. This is hands-on work at the intersection of distributed backend engineering and applied AI: multi-agent workflows, tool-execution infrastructure, retrieval and relevance, and integrations with multiple LLM providers — all running as real, customer-facing production services with the reliability expectations that implies.

Responsibilities:
Design and implement scalable multi-agent workflows (including conversation state), tool-execution infrastructure, and data-aware tools working with catalogs, schemas, lineage, SQL, jobs, semantic metadata, data preparation, and visualizations
Build search and retrieval capabilities with OpenSearch or equivalent — indexing, relevance tuning, hybrid keyword + vector search
Integrate multiple LLM/model providers with secure configuration and graceful degradation
Develop APIs and event contracts across REST, streaming/SSE, gRPC, protobuf, and SDKs, including UI integrations
Operate, monitor, and improve production services — service health, logs, metrics, traces, search-cluster health, latency, and error rates; participate in the team's production-support model
Investigate incidents, drive root-cause analysis, and ship durable fixes
Design for permissions, tool approvals, multi-tenancy, and customer-data governance
Maintain dependencies, apply security fixes, and reduce tech debt; produce designs, tests, runbooks, and documentation; lead technical discussions and review code.

Required Qualifications:
B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience
7+ years of relevant experience, or equivalent demonstrated senior-level impact
Strong Java software engineering skills
Strong grasp of concurrency, data structures, API design, testing, maintainability, and backward compatibility
Solid background in distributed systems, microservices, cloud services, or data-intensive backends
Hands-on experience with search technologies — OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or Lucene — including vector search, embeddings, or relevance systems
Experience building LLM applications, agent/tool workflows, RAG systems, or model-provider integrations
Strong production instincts: diagnosing failures via logs, metrics, and traces; designing for fault tolerance, retries, cancellation, and recovery
SQL and familiarity with data platform concepts: catalogs, metadata, schemas, governance, lineage
Comfort leading ambiguous, cross-service work with clear stakeholder communication and strong written documentation
Comfortable with AI-assisted development workflows — using modern AI tools productively while critically validating their output
English Upper-Intermediate or higher (B2+) — daily written and verbal communication with a US-based engineering team
Availability to work EU business hours shifted 2–3 hours later for daily overlap with US West Coast mornings.

Desired Skills:
LangChain4j or similar agent frameworks
Python for AI services, evaluation harnesses, or sandboxed execution
React and TypeScript
gRPC, protobuf, Quarkus, Kubernetes, MongoDB, KV stores, event-driven architectures
Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, OpenLineage, semantic layers, or data-governance systems
AI quality evaluation: LLM-as-judge, model benchmarking, production AI metrics
OpenSearch operations: index lifecycle management, relevance tuning, incident response
Open-source contributions.

Details:
Engagement: Long-term contract
Location: Europe (EU / EEA / UK), remote
Working hours: EU business hours, shifted 2–3 hours later for daily overlap with the US West Coast team