Hydrohoof

Company Description

HydroHoof is an early‑stage, inventor‑led company building a new multimodal search engine as part of a broader intelligent systems ecosystem. As a multi‑patent founder, I’m assembling a small founding team to help architect core technology from the ground up. I focus on practical engineering, fast iteration, and solving real‑world problems with search‑driven systems. This is a hands‑on, high‑ownership environment where every decision shapes the future of the product.

Role Description

As the Founding Search Engineer, you will architect and build the core search infrastructure — indexing pipelines, ranking algorithms, query processing, and scalable APIs. You’ll define search requirements, run experiments, evaluate relevance, and iterate quickly. You’ll also establish engineering standards for search quality, reliability, monitoring, and performance. This role is equity‑based, highly technical, and designed for someone who wants to build a search engine from scratch alongside the founder. The team is based in Hemet, CA.

Qualifications

• Experience building search or IR systems (indexing, ranking, query parsing)
• Strong backend engineering skills (Python, Java, Go, etc.)
• Knowledge of algorithms, data structures, distributed systems
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Lucene, or custom IR stacks
• Experience evaluating search quality (metrics, A/B tests, relevance analysis)
• Comfort working in early‑stage environments with high autonomy
• Strong communication and documentation skills
• CS/Engineering degree or equivalent experience
• Startup or domain-specific search experience is a plus