Staff Software Engineer - Search
Harmonic · New York City ·
- Work mode
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Category
- Software engineering
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Company size
- 51-200
- Salary
- USD 210,000 – 280,000 / year
Harmonic · New York City ·
Builds and scales Harmonic’s AI-powered startup discovery engine, designing search, ranking, and agentic workflows to surface breakout companies for investors and GTM teams.
Every day, thousands of new companies are founded. Most will never matter. A few will change everything.
Harmonic helps startups get discovered by the investors, customers, partners, and talent that will change the trajectory of their company.
We are a living, breathing record of the innovation economy. Allowing our customers to understand who matters, what’s happening, where to look next, and how to make decisions.
We're doubling revenue annually, profitable, and backed with $30M from Craft, Floodgate, Sozo Ventures, and plenty of other industry leaders. We're committed to ensuring hundreds of billions of dollars find the right founders, so the innovations that matter most flourish. If that resonates, let's talk.
The Discovery team sits at the core of Harmonic's product and data engine. We make it possible to search, research, analyze, compare, and evaluate across the entire universe of startups (we track tens of millions of companies, hundreds of millions of operators, and tens of thousands of investors along with their deal activity, and counting). We source and ingest data from first-, second-, and third-party sources, including hundreds of fragmented and unstructured sources, and turn them into structured insights and searchable indices. Recently, we built the industry leading agentic layer for startup search and research, unlocking new paradigms for VCs to make sense of this vast amount of data on startups and automate critical tasks in their sourcing and diligence workflows.
We're in the middle of a massive platform shift where AI and LLMs are transforming what "software" is. Agentic product and user experience patterns will be spelled out in playbooks before long, and we're building those playbooks, not waiting for them. This includes conversational interfaces, deep research, dynamic agentic frameworks purpose built for venture, and AI-first product workflows. We're looking for people who want to help redefine software and push on this frontier with deep curiosity, an insatiable growth mindset, and high agency.
To learn more about the team:
Explore Working with Sang
Check out your Scout-focused teammates Austin, Yesh, and Kelvin
Explore the Team Page. We're a mix of ex-founders and seasoned engineers from top engineering institutions like Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Meta.
You have 7-8+ years of experience building distributed systems or large-scale backend architecture.
You've designed and scaled search, recommendation, or ranking systems that balance precision, recall, and performance.
You've led or heavily contributed to ML or LLM integrations in production.
You have a track record of technical leadership: mentoring others, introducing frameworks, and influencing technical direction.
You have strong experience with data-intensive systems, asynchronous processing, or event-driven architectures.
Architect the core intelligence behind Scout.
Own the end-to-end architecture of our sourcing engine, from data ingestion to ranking, personalization, and model orchestration.
Define scalable frameworks for retrieval, reranking, and LLM-driven evaluation to ensure we deliver highly personalized, high-quality results.
Create architectural patterns that integrate Scout seamlessly with our existing products to power repeatable sourcing workflows.
Lead agentic experimentation and evaluation.
Drive technical discovery for emerging technologies, including memory systems, schema, prompt libraries, embedding models, and agentic frameworks.
Improve and extend our evaluation pipelines to test new models and determine lift in specific parts of our product.
Build systems that allow fast iteration without compromising quality or reliability. Our priorities are reliability, performance, cost, and then developer productivity.
Shape AI-native product experiences.
Partner with Product and Design to define patterns that make LLM-powered sourcing intuitive and fast.
Translate ambiguous product goals into scalable technical designs that unblock new workflows for our users.
Establish best practices for building AI-first UX patterns, including agentic flows, async interactions, and structured outputs.
Provide architectural leadership across engineering.
Mentor and guide engineers on the team, raising the bar for system design, documentation, and technical decision making.
Drive clarity in cross-team architecture with Flow, Data, and Infra, ensuring Sourcing evolves as a cohesive, maintainable system.
Set long-term technical direction for how we build AI-powered sourcing systems.
Here’s our interview process:
Recruiter Screening: 20 mins
Technical Screening (Debugging): 45 mins
Technical Screening (System Design): 45 mins
Jam Session: 2 hours
Behavioral interviews with our Head of Engineering and CEO: 30 mins each
References
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to recruiting, hiring and promoting qualified people of all backgrounds regardless of gender, race, color, creed, national origin, religion, age, marital status, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by federal, state, or local law.