Senior Software Engineer - Query Intelligence & Semantic Platform

Senior Software Engineer - Query Intelligence & Semantic Platform

LOCATION | Hydrolix | USCAN, Remote

Job Description

Today’s reality:

• Solutions engineers manually translate questions into queries
• Every customer’s schema is different. Even when they represent a similar concept they often have different contextual meaning
• We rebuild similar logic for each new product

Your mission: You’ll build a semantic intelligence system that translates customer questions into correct queries automatically.

Customers have a wide range of data that takes multiple forms, but the kinds of questions they ask are all connected: Tell me what this data means to my business. Today, someone has to manually figure out which fields to query, what filters are required, what to query, and how to present the knowledge. We are building a system which implements that based on knowledge. This knowledge may be domain specific expertise or it might be extracted from data. To build this, we need semantic contracts, a query planning system to leverage those contracts, validation and composition tooling, and well versioned APIs to be consumed by other downstream tooling.

This isn’t just metadata management—it’s the intelligence layer that makes the “ask a question” to “get a correct answer and interpretation” pipeline automatic instead of manual.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement the contract schema, registry, query planners, and APIs
• Implement validation systems that catch errors before execution
• Optimize query generation for performance and correctness
• Work with product teams to understand semantic requirements
• Partner with data engineers on schema → concept mappings

Qualifications and Skills

• 5-7+ years building data infrastructure, query systems, or semantic platforms
• Strong software engineering fundamentals (APIs, type systems, testing, versioning)
• Experience with schema design and contract languages (Protocol Buffers, JSON Schema, GraphQL, or similar)
• Python or Rust for building production services
• Understanding of columnar databases / OLAP systems (ClickHouse, Druid, Pinot)—you know how storage affects query planning
• SQL expertise—you can read query plans, understand performance characteristics, and optimize queries
• Comfort with ambiguity—you can design systems when requirements are still forming
• Track record of building infrastructure other engineers depend on

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience building query planners, SQL compilers, or semantic query systems
• Background with semantic web
• Understanding of query optimization and execution planning
• metrics)

Why This Role Matters

This is foundational infrastructure. Every question a customer asks flows through the systems you build. If you do this right:

• Customers get answers in seconds instead of hours
• Product teams ship features faster (semantic layer handles complexity)
• AI systems can reason about data (they understand concepts, not just syntax)
• Solutions engineers spend less time writing queries manually

You’ll have significant design and implementation ownership. This is still in the design phase and while we have aggressive delivery goals, we do not want to shortchange the plan or design. You will have direct influence on all phases of the project

How We Work

• AI-assisted development: We value velocity and correctness.
• Collaborative design: We work with our entire organization so that we build a solution that addresses a specific need

Production mindset: This becomes critical infrastructure. Versioning, observability, and backward compatibility matter from day one.