Senior Engineer – AI Search & Retrieval

(hands-on, delivery-focused)

📍 Vienna / Remote (Europe)

💼 Salary + meaningful ownership (equity optional, role-dependent)

🧠 AI, Search, Enterprise SaaS

About Howie

Howie is an early-stage AI company in the AEC (architecture & engineering) space. We help enterprise teams reuse knowledge from past projects to reduce costly rework during planning and pre-construction.

We’re working with  co-creation customers across the EU and UK , have a  live product in production , and are preparing for an  early seed round  backed by top-tier industry investors (already backed by 2 strong industry VCs Pilabs and DAR)

The role

We’re looking for a  senior, experienced, and hands-on engineer  to help stabilize delivery, improve relevance and reliability of our AI search systems, and support a small engineering team during a critical growth phase.

This role is  primarily execution-focused (~75%) , with  light technical leadership and mentoring (~25%) . It is a  production-oriented role , not a research-only or people-management-heavy position.

You’ll work closely with product and the founding team to turn real customer needs into reliable, shipped functionality.

What you’ll do

• Own technical execution of our AI search & retrieval pipeline
• Improve relevance, latency, and robustness of RAG-based systems in line with customer needs
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions, optimizing for impact over perfection
• Mentor junior engineers and raise execution quality and delivery cadence
• Close collaboration and context translation between engineering team, Head of Product and CEO (product on roadmap trade-offs)
• Provide technical input during enterprise discussions and fundraising

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience
• Strong Python background and experience running production systems
• Practical experience building search, retrieval, or RAG systems
• Solid understanding of classical IR (TF-IDF, BM25) and embedding-based ranking
• Hands-on experience with vector databases (e.g. Qdrant) and similarity search (cosine, L2)
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and monitoring/logging tools (e.g. Grafana)
• Experience deploying and operating cloud systems (AWS or Azure)
• Comfort working in early-stage environments with ambiguity and constraints

Nice to have (not required)

• Experience applying ML or AI systems in production
• Exposure to startup or scale-up environments
• Familiarity with enterprise requirements (security, cost awareness, reliability)
• Experience with multimodal retrieval (image/video embeddings, VLMs)

Why join Howie

• Work on  real customer problems in production , with systems used daily by architects and engineers
• Own meaningful parts of the product  end-to-end , from design to deployment, with direct user feedback
• Join a  small, focused team  with short feedback loops, high autonomy, and real influence
• Grow into broader technical ownership and leadership as the company scales

📩  Interested?  Reach out at:

contact@howie.systems

🌐 www.howie.systems

TO APPLY PLEASE USE THIS LINK; https://shorturl.at/4hgw1