# Senior Software Engineer, Vector Index Research at Zilliz Cloud

- Company: Zilliz Cloud
- What the company does: Zilliz offers a fully managed Vector Lakebase powered by Milvus, unifying real-time vector search, lake-scale discovery, and AI data operations. Available across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure regions worldwide. Backed by AI Grant.
- Company website: https://zilliz.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: Redwood City
- Work setup: Hybrid
- Pay: $175K to $250K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-06-22
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.lever.co/zilliz/5e73c85a-7acf-43f1-8936-68396bb74e82
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/zilliz-cloud-senior-software-engineer-vector-index-research/

## About the role

This role sits at the intersection of research and engineering. You will read papers, evaluate new algorithms, build prototypes, and turn promising ideas into production-grade vector indexing and retrieval systems. We are looking for engineers who enjoy research, but also have strong engineering fundamentals, performance optimization skills, and engineering taste.

## What they're looking for

- 3+ years of experience in vector search, ANN algorithms, search systems, high-performance computing, or performance-critical systems
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Strong C++ or Rust programming ability and solid engineering fundamentals
- Experience with vector similarity search, ANN algorithms, index structures, quantization, compression, reranking, or high-performance retrieval systems is a strong plus
- Strong interest in research-driven engineering: reading papers, evaluating tradeoffs, building prototypes, and turning ideas into production systems
- Experience with performance optimization and systematic debugging is a strong plus, especially around CPU/GPU execution, SIMD, memory layout, concurrency, I/O, or large-scale data processing

Tags: Vector Database