Junior Software Engineer

Summary

Shade Inc. is a rapidly growing company that has developed advanced AI search and labeling technology for the media industry. They are seeking a Junior AI Search Engineer to work on enhancing their search capabilities, focusing on indexing, retrieval, and integrating customer data sources into their platform.

Responsibilities

• You’ll work on the indexing and retrieval pipeline: helping improve LLM re-ranking, evaluating retrieval quality, and iterating on chunking and embedding strategies
• You’ll work on integrating: Customers have data sources and information outside of the platform. We want to play well with someone’s entire business

Skills

• 0–2 years of full-time engineering experience, or strong internship, research, or project work that shows you can ship production code
• Solid Python fundamentals — comfort reading and writing backend code, not just notebooks
• Some exposure to LLM-powered systems: RAG, embeddings, semantic search — whether through work, coursework, or a side project you're proud of
• Curiosity about how retrieval systems work and why they fail
• Pre-Series B startup experience is a plus, but not required

Qualifications

Must Haves

• 0–2 years of full-time engineering experience, or strong internship, research, or project work that shows you can ship production code
• Solid Python fundamentals — comfort reading and writing backend code, not just notebooks
• Some exposure to LLM-powered systems: RAG, embeddings, semantic search — whether through work, coursework, or a side project you're proud of
• Curiosity about how retrieval systems work and why they fail

Nice to Haves

• Pre-Series B startup experience is a plus, but not required

Benefits

• Free lunch (under $30)
• Free dinner (under $30) if you stay more than 9 hours
• Fully covered health insurance, including dental and vision
• 401k with % match
• Unlimited PTO
• Lifetime gym membership
• Commuter benefit for the subway