Senior Backend Engineer, Data Platform / Search (Defense Tech)

Overview

• Senior+ backend role on the Data Platform team, which owns the search, pipelines and identity systems behind the flagship platform and agentic workflows.
• AEP Hawaii is hiring on behalf of a profitable, venture-backed defense tech unicorn building agentic AI for national security and the Indo-Pacific mission.
• This is a NON-CLEARED role. No active security clearance is required to apply or to start.
• We are specifically looking for commercial software engineers from 0-to-1 startups (Seed through Series D). Prior defense or government experience is NOT required.

The Opportunity

• Search sits at the heart of the product. Drive the technical strategy across full-text, vector and LLM-powered retrieval, working directly with the ML team.
• Bring commercial, startup-speed engineering into defense: small agile team, high ownership, and products used by real operators on the front lines.
• Fast-growing, profitable company (roughly $3M to $80M ARR in three years) with a product-first, user-empathy engineering culture.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve the shared search platform: indexing, retrieval and relevance primitives other teams build on.
• Improve search latency, relevance, index quality and freshness.
• Partner with product engineers, designers and mission strategists to turn user needs into search improvements.
• Apply emerging techniques in information retrieval, vector search and LLMs.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend development, with 3+ years in search or information retrieval.
• Deep understanding of indexing, ranking, query parsing, tokenization and vector search.
• Hands-on with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or Lucene; familiarity with evaluation metrics (precision, recall, NDCG).
• Experience leading design of production systems and mentoring engineers.
• Preferred: NLP/ML background, vector databases, LLM-powered retrieval.
• Non-cleared: no clearance needed. Commercial startup background (Seed to Series D) strongly preferred over defense-only backgrounds.

Engagement Details

• Compensation: $150,000 – $215,000 + equity.
• Full-time, direct hire with the client. Remote (US).
• Non-cleared: no active clearance required. U.S. Person status required (access to U.S.-only data systems).
• Optional travel to meet users and mission teams.
• Benefits include health/dental/vision, unlimited PTO, 401(k) match, WeWork access, wellbeing stipends, and fully paid parental leave.
• Equal opportunity employer.