Applied Search & Retrieval Expert - Frontify Team

Our partner Frontify, creates the best and most user-friendly brand management platform - a platform that enables anyone to deliver compelling and consistent brand experiences. Frontify is empowering thousands of different-sized companies around the world, including Facebook, Lufthansa, Vodafone, and Allianz.

Frontify is a scale-up company with over 300 employees, with international teams – headquarters in St. Gallen, Switzerland; a growing team in the US; colleagues working remotely from all over Europe and now also growing with InterVenture. Frontify is built on a collaborative culture of experimentation, trust, and transparency. We believe in being happy and fulfilled at work, and letting our personalities shine through everything we do.

About the team

Frontify engineering team is a group of motivated, collaborative, and innovative people. They are designers, product managers, and developers from more than seven different countries. They enjoy working together to create and evolve a well-loved product but always keep room for new ideas and approaches. Aside from work, some of them are parents, gamers, bookworms, adrenaline junkies, and so much more.

Together with our partner, we are looking for a:

Applied Search & Retrieval Expert

to join our team in Belgrade and help build scalable, high-quality, and cost-efficient search and retrieval capabilities. In this role, you will own the search and retrieval architecture, evaluation approach, and key technical decisions across evolving data contexts.

Your responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the search and retrieval architecture across existing and expanding search efforts.

• Own the retrieval evaluation approach, including the evaluation harness, golden datasets, automated metrics, human evaluation, regression testing, and failure analysis.

• Define and contribute to technical decision principles around what to build, buy, tune, simplify, or skip.

• Help shape search and retrieval capabilities that deliver high quality across diverse, messy, heterogeneous, and evolving data contexts.

• Diagnose retrieval issues systematically across data quality, indexing, embeddings, query formulation, ranking, permissions, product UX, and evaluation design.

• Make quality, latency, cost, and complexity trade-offs explicit and guide technical decisions accordingly.

• Act as a force multiplier for the wider engineering team by sharing expertise, shortening learning curves, and identifying potential pitfalls early.

• Help evolve search capabilities as product requirements, data contexts, and the technology landscape change.

Your profile:

• You have built, owned, or significantly shaped production search and retrieval systems in larger product environments.

• You have strong practical experience with keyword, vector, and hybrid search, including ranking, reranking, query understanding, chunking, metadata strategies, and relevance tuning.

• You have solid knowledge of the traditional search stack, including text analysis and tokenization, BM25 and lexical ranking, index architecture, structured retrieval, and permission-aware search.

• You have experience designing and operating retrieval evaluation systems, including golden datasets, human evaluation, automated metrics, regression testing, and failure analysis.

• You can systematically diagnose retrieval issues across data quality, indexing, queries, embeddings, ranking, permissions, UX, and evaluation.

• You understand and can communicate the trade-offs between quality, latency, cost, and complexity.

• You have worked with messy, heterogeneous, and evolving data in real-world environments.

• You have strong engineering judgment around what to build, buy, tune, simplify, or skip, and can act as a technical multiplier for the wider team.

Nice to have:

• Experience with OpenSearch or comparable enterprise search technologies.

• Experience supporting the development of MCP server capabilities that are reliable, well-scoped, secure, and easy for product teams to build on.

• Experience migrating or evolving production search systems without significant downtime or disruption.

Our offer:

• We value work-life balance and have flexible working hours

• Lots of team activities and perks: yearly retreats, workshops, hackathons

• A chance to work with a team of experienced engineers committed to continuous learning, with opportunities for growth through knowledge-sharing sessions and webinars

• Work with an international team of world-class engineers

• A modern, sunny, open working place with a positive and fun atmosphere.

• A stimulating work experience that will allow you to grow both professionally and personally