Software engineers and AI agents alike suffer from the same problem: finding that one person or place that will answer their tough, specific question. Many solutions promise to solve this with similarity search in vector databases. Unfortunately, finding the answer is often a puzzle with pieces to be collected across a myriad of contradictory sources and cannot be solved without surgical search and careful reasoning.

Spectrum collects data from an organization's code, docs, and issues, and organizes knowledge in a unified ontology that AI agents can efficiently search through and reason over. We aim to revolutionize the semantic layer space for software-building organizations and move beyond specs that fall out of sync with code, introducing a living spec – one that's extracted from the whole system and used to keep it aligned. Spectrum is meant to be the single source of truth for all product and architectural knowledge.

A resident of JetBrains' startup incubator, Spectrum enjoys startup speed and autonomy, and is backed by 25 years of developer tooling expertise. We are looking for a Senior AI/ML Engineer to build and evolve the ML-powered systems at the heart of our product.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Designing and building the ML/LLM solution for data ingestion, knowledge extraction and retrieval, and subsequent reasoning.
• Creating datasets, metrics, and pipelines that drive measurable improvements across the system.
• Architecting and improving AI agents, which will involve prompt engineering, model selection, and inference optimization.
• Contributing to our MLOps practices, including orchestration, observability, and experiment tracking.

We expect you to have:

• At least four years of experience building ML/AI systems in production environments, with hands-on LLM experience.
• A deep understanding of the LLM ecosystem, including model architectures and fine-tuning approaches.
• Hands-on experience with:
• Prompt engineering and LLM pipeline design, including evaluation.
• Agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, Pydantic AI, or an equivalent.
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns and vector databases.
• Deploying and scaling LLM-powered applications using APIs (e.g. OpenAI or Anthropic) or open-source models.
• Strong Python skills – Kotlin knowledge would be a plus.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Proficiency in English, both written and verbal.

Our ideal candidate would also have:

• Experience with ontologies, knowledge graphs, or graph-based reasoning.
• Experience in early-stage startups – you enjoy the zero-to-one phase.
• A background in code analysis, developer tools, or software engineering research.
• Experience with multi-agent systems or complex agentic workflows.
• Actively contributed to relevant open-source projects or publications.

What we offer:

• A competitive salary and JetBrains benefits.
• A generous runway and corporate resources with startup autonomy.
• A motivated team that moves fast, with short feedback loops, rapid prototyping, and lots of ownership.
• Opportunities to publish research at top venues in collaboration with JetBrains Research.

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