Software Engineer | AI Search

About the role:

8am is looking for a Senior Engineer to join our team of seasoned AI engineers who are delivering on the roadmap of AI features to enhance and expand our 8am suite of products. In this role, you will design and build AI-powered features that delight our customers, create new capabilities, and strengthen our platform. You will collaborate with engineers, product managers, and data scientists to bring cutting-edge AI into production, ensuring it drives meaningful business and customer outcomes.

This role is hired through an Employer of Record (EOR) partner in the Czech Republic.

About us:

At 8am, our vision is to power a world where professionals thrive. We start every day on a mission to empower professionals with the most trusted, innovative technology to deliver world-class outcomes for their clients and exceptional financial results for their business. They count on our purpose-built solutions to simplify operations, ensure compliance, and fuel profitable growth, so they can focus on their clients and do more of the work that matters.

Founded in 2005, 8am™ (formerly AffiniPay) is the professional business platform built to help legal, accounting, and other client-focused professionals run stronger, more profitable businesses. Today, more than 250,000 professionals across the U.S. trust 8am to help them work smarter, serve clients better, and unlock their full potential. We have been recognized as one of Inc 5000’s fastest growing companies in the U.S. for 13 years in a row, and as a result, our teams continue to grow as well!

What you'll do:

• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to translate business problems into AI-powered search and retrieval solutions.
• Design and build hybrid search systems combining keyword search (BM25) and semantic/vector search to power intelligent discovery across large datasets.
• Develop and optimize retrieval pipelines used in RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) and AI-driven applications.
• Build scalable pipelines for document ingestion, indexing, embedding generation, and search ranking.
• Partner with the Data team to ensure the right data is collected, enriched, chunked, and indexed for retrieval systems.
• Design and implement AI-powered services that combine LLMs with search infrastructure.
• Write high-quality Python code to manipulate data, build search pipelines, and evaluate retrieval performance.
• Develop tools and infrastructure to support relevance tuning, search quality evaluation, and continuous improvement of ranking models.
• Work with our cloud operations team to deploy AI search services, monitor performance, and improve latency, relevance, and reliability

About you:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in backend systems, or search infrastructure.
• Experience building search or retrieval systems for large document stores
• Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or similar search platforms.
• Experience implementing hybrid search combining keyword-based retrieval with vector embeddings.
• Strong Python or equivalent modern tech stack development skills.
• Familiarity with document processing pipelines (chunking, embeddings, indexing).
• Experience building scalable data infrastructure into production SaaS systems.

Nice to have: 

• Experience with vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, FAISS).
• Experience tuning search ranking and relevance models.
• Background in information retrieval or search relevance engineering.
• Experience building RAG systems or AI agents.
• Experience working with LLMs and retrieval-augmented architectures.
• Familiarity with large-scale document processing (OCR, structured document extraction).
• Exposure to fintech or the legal industry.

Why join our new 8am Brno hub?

• Founding Team Impact: Be a founding engineer of our new Brno R&D hub. After a brief 1-6 month integration with U.S. based teams, you will help form fully autonomous, locally-led squads with clear paths to Staff and leadership roles
• Drive our "AI-First" Transformation: We are building a secure, massive-scale "Unified AI Platform". Depending on your squad, you will either help architect this core infrastructure (LLM routing, RAG, agent orchestration) or build directly on top of it.
• Build the Next Generation of Our Platform: Help shape the systems powering products used by more than 250,000 professionals. You’ll work on complex platform capabilities across payments, workflow automation, and AI-powered features as we expand into new professional service markets.

Benefits and Perks

We offer a competitive, locally relevant benefits package designed to support your life in the Czech Republic while giving you access to global opportunities:

• Flexible Time Off (FTO) and 13 paid public holidays aligned with the Czech calendar
• Paid sick leave with additional support through the Czech social security system
• Maternity, paternity, and parental leave in line with Czech regulations, plus additional paid paternity leave from 8am
• Full statutory benefits, including public health insurance, social security, pension, and work accident coverage
• Possible performance bonus opportunities in the future and employee referral rewards

Grow Your Career

• Access to Coursera (including Gen AI Academy) and ongoing professional development
• Clear growth paths, regular feedback, and opportunities for advancement

What Makes 8am Different:

• International company environment with collaboration across Europe and the U.S.
• Opportunities to travel for company events (including potential U.S. visits)
• Engaging team culture with local events, outings, and community initiatives
• High-quality company swag and programs focused on wellness, learning, and connection

Diversity, equity & inclusion at 8am:

At 8am, we recognize that innovation occurs with a strong team of people who are diverse in background, personality, talent and ideas. Experience comes in many forms and ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace where we continue to learn from each other is an integral part of our culture. We are committed to creating a welcoming and transparent environment for all that embraces those differences through education, equal access to opportunities and information, inclusionary programs, and community outreach. 

Why 8am 

At 8am, our culture is shaped by the people who bring it to life every day. Together, we build a company rooted in continuous learning, genuine community, holistic wellness, and meaningful engagement—values that empower us as individuals and unite us as a team. Our culture is grounded in our core values: Work Smart, Win Fast; Outshine Ordinary, and We Find a Way. These values drive how we serve our customers and work with each other in a collaborative, inspiring, and empowering environment, every day.

Security advisory:

Our hiring teams at 8am are dedicated to recruiting top talent that share our passion for serving the professional services industry through innovative financial technology.  As such, our Talent Acquisition Team only follows legitimate hiring practices.  We will always communicate with our candidates using emails with the 8am domain and will never ask for sensitive/personal data during the application process.  All interviews take place over phone call, Zoom/Google Meet or in person.  All offers are communicated verbally by our Talent Acquisition Specialists with a written offer letter as a follow up.