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Search Engineer (Relevance and Evaluation)
Contract, UK Remote
At-a-Glance
- Contract, inside IR35, day rate confirmed on application
- Fully remote within the UK. You need to be UK-based
- You must be eligible for UK security clearance to SC minimum. Some projects may require sole UK nationality
- One job: stand over the search function and prove it works
About the Company
My client builds sovereign AI products for defence, national security and government customers. They hold a very large amount of customer data, and the value of the product rests on operators finding the right thing in it quickly.
The Role
The search function exists and there is plenty of data behind it. What is missing is someone to own it and evidence it. You will tune relevancy, take the search features that have been built and validate them properly against gold sets and real operator queries, and leave behind an evaluation harness that catches a regression before a customer does.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the search function end to end, from index design through to relevancy and query latency
- Validate every search feature against a gold set, with nDCG, MRR and recall@k measured before and after
- Tune Elasticsearch or OpenSearch relevancy through analysers, mappings, boosting and function scoring
- Evaluate hybrid dense and sparse retrieval against a keyword baseline and keep whichever actually wins
- Run labelling workflows with domain SMEs, including inter-annotator agreement checks
- Automate retrieval evaluation in CI so relevancy regressions fail the build
What You'll Need
Essential:
- 5+ years on production search systems
- Elasticsearch or OpenSearch in production, including analysers, mappings and scoring functions
- Relevancy tuning you can point to a measured improvement from
- Retrieval evaluation experience: gold sets, nDCG, MRR, recall@k and the labelling that feeds them
- Embeddings and at least one vector store in production, with a view on chunking and ANN trade-offs
- Indexing, latency and caching tuned against a defined SLO
- Strong Python, plus tests and CI/CD
- Eligible for UK security clearance to SC minimum and willing to undergo vetting
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Desirable / Nice to Have:
- Existing SC or DV clearance
- Defence or other regulated environments, or deployment into air-gapped, on-premise or sovereign cloud
- Learning-to-rank or cross-encoder re-ranking
Why Apply?
- Day rate inside IR35, confirmed on application
- Fully remote within the UK for the duration of the contract
- A clean remit. You own search, and nobody else is holding half of it
- Serious volumes of real data rather than a toy corpus
- BPSS then SC application supported if you are not already cleared
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
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