Senior Solutions Engineer

Does it sound interesting to work on an open source platform managing the data and real-time search and inference for some of the largest companies in the world? Would you thrive on working directly with engineering teams at some of the world's largest companies to design, tune and scale AI search applications running on hundreds to thousands of nodes? If so, we want you to join our team at Vespa.ai as a Senior Solutions Engineer!

About Vespa.ai:

Vespa.ai is a team of passionate builders. We maintain and develop the Apache 2.0 licensed open-source AI search platform Vespa.

Vespa is a fully featured search engine and vector database. It supports vector search (ANN), lexical search, and structured data search, all in a single query. Integrated machine-learning model inference enables the application of AI to make sense of data in real time. Together with Vespa's proven scalability and high availability, this empowers to create production-ready search applications at any scale and with any combination of features. Our users and customers are #1 in e-commerce, content, and financial services globally, and are powering companies such as Perplexity, Spotify, Yahoo, Wix, and many more.

In addition to our open-source platform, Vespa.ai develops and runs Vespa Cloud, a robust SaaS offering that allows businesses to harness the power of our technology with ease.

At Vespa.ai, we are extremely focused on automating everything we do to grow fast and maintain high quality. In all roles, we scale through technology, not simply by adding larger teams. We take pride in being small, nimble, and the most productive.

Position overview

Our largest customers and prospects run Vespa at a scale few systems reach: billions of documents, thousands of queries per second, clusters of hundreds to thousands of nodes. Getting there — and staying there — requires deep understanding of both Vespa and the customer's problem.

We are seeking a Senior Solutions Engineer to be the hands-on technical partner for these customers. You will help them design schemas and ranking, plan capacity, tune performance, and migrate from existing systems, from first proof of concept through production and growth. This is a role for someone who does the real work: you will build, benchmark, debug and tune alongside customer teams, not just draw architecture diagrams. You will also bring what you learn back to the Vespa engineering team to improve the product.

At our Trondheim office, we work office-first: you will be based on-site most of the time, with the flexibility to work from home/remotely when needed, as agreed with your manager. Since our customers are spread across the globe, the role requires some flexibility in working hours to meet with customer teams in other time zones, and will involve some travel to customer sites and industry events.

Responsibilities

• Act as the primary technical counterpart for our largest customers and prospects.
• Design and review Vespa application architectures: schemas, ranking, document and query processing, and cluster topology.
• Plan capacity and lead performance tuning and benchmarking efforts for large-scale deployments.
• Run proofs of concept and support migrations from other search and vector database systems.
• Assist in diagnosing and resolving complex production issues together with customers and the Vespa engineering team.
• Feed customer requirements and product gaps back into the Vespa roadmap.
• Contribute to documentation, sample applications and technical content based on real-world experience.

Qualifications

• Strong programming skills in Java, Python or similar languages.
• Solid understanding of search, ranking or database internals, and of performance analysis on large systems.
• Experience working directly with external engineering teams or customers on technical solutions.
• Excellent communication skills, written and spoken.
• Good understanding of sound software engineering principles and practices.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
• Fluent written and spoken English. Norwegian is not required.

Desired Skills

• Experience with building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with Vespa, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Solr or a vector database.
• Experience with machine-learned ranking, embeddings or retrieval-augmented generation.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Background in e-commerce, content or financial-services search and recommendation.

Some of Our Tools and Services

• Vespa and Vespa Cloud
• Java, Python
• AWS, GCP, and Azure
• Grafana, Jira Service Desk, Slack, GitHub

Why Join Us:

• Opportunities for professional growth and development as part of one of Europe's most exciting start-ups!
• Be part of a cutting-edge team working on innovative search and recommendation technology.
• Work on a team where we don't believe in silos between engineers; there aren't "developers", "ops people", and "sysadmins". We're all engineers solving problems the smart way together!
• Competitive salary and benefits.
• Relocating to Norway? We'll help you settle in, and offer voluntary Norwegian language training if you have a right to work in Norway.