Firmable is the market-leading B2B sales intelligence platform in Asia-Pacific. Our competitive moat is our data — the deepest, most localised company and people dataset in every market we operate in. We've proven the model in ANZ. Now we're scaling it across Southeast Asia and beyond.

Great data only wins when someone can show a prospect exactly why it matters. This role closes that loop.

We're not building another search box. We're building the engine that tells a salesperson exactly who to call, why, and what to say — before they even ask.

The Role

This is one of the most technically and strategically important roles at Firmable. As Search & Intelligence Lead, you will own the engine that sits at the heart of everything we do: search, discovery, personalisation, and AI-powered recommendations.

You'll lead a small, senior team with direct responsibility for the full stack of intelligent search — from query understanding and agentic retrieval through to personalisation systems, context management, and real-time recommendation pipelines. You'll be the technical force driving this function, while also setting direction, mentoring engineers, and operating as the connective tissue between our data platform, application, and product teams.

This role is ~80% hands-on engineering, ~20% team lead and cross-functional collaboration. If you're looking to move into pure management, this isn't it. If you want to build genuinely cutting-edge systems and have the influence to shape the architecture, this is your role.

What You'll Own

Search Architecture & Engineering

Architect and evolve Firmable's core search system, currently built on AWS OpenSearch (BM25, semantic, and LLM-based retrieval) across 130M-200M documents
Drive the transition to next-generation search paradigms — moving beyond RAG toward structured, low-latency retrieval suited to short, entity-rich data
Design and implement agentic search capabilities: queries that reason across our database and go external to the web to fetch missing signals in real time
Build and optimise query pipelines for both filter-based and natural language search — from "software companies in Brisbane" to "find me businesses impacted by the Queensland floods"
Introduce vector embeddings and semantic layers where they add genuine value

Intelligence & Personalisation

Build the user context engine that powers personalised recommendations: synthesising engagement behaviour, credit consumption events, and CRM-synced deal data into rich per-user context
Implement and scale context management across multiple stores (Snowflake for analytical context, graph-based stores like Mem0/Zep for low-latency retrieval)
Design and ship the prospect recommendation system — the "who to call today and why" experience that turns Firmable into a sales teammate, not just a database
Leverage LLMs to distil raw context into actionable intelligence: summarised user intent, signal-weighted scoring, and personalised pitch triggers

Team & Cross-Functional Leadership

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 3–4 engineers; set technical standards and shape how the team operates day-to-day
Collaborate closely with the Data Platform team (the factory producing the dataset) and the Application team (the user experience layer) — this function is the glue between the two
Partner with Product to translate early-stage ideas into architecture decisions and working prototypes, fast
Participate in architecture reviews, set the bar for code quality, observability, and testing practices across the team

What We're Looking For

Must Haves

5+ years of hands-on experience building and operating production search systems using Elasticsearch or OpenSearch at significant scale
Deep fluency in modern AI/LLM-powered search: query understanding, semantic retrieval, learning to rank, hybrid search pipelines
Experience building and shipping agentic systems — AI agents that take actions, call tools, and reason across multiple steps in production environments
Strong Python engineering skills; experience building APIs (FastAPI preferred)
Practical experience with context and memory management for personalisation or recommendation systems
A builder's instinct: you can go from whiteboard to working prototype to production without waiting for a roadmap
Exceptional cross-functional communication — comfortable presenting to exec stakeholders and rolling up your sleeves to debug a query pipeline the same afternoon
You operate with a fully AI-native development workflow — agentic coding, AI-driven test generation, and automated review pipelines are your default, not your experiment. In 2026, this is table stakes at Firmable.

Highly Valued

Experience with personalisation, recommendation systems, or user context modelling at product scale
Familiarity with knowledge graph or graph-based memory stores (Mem0, Zep, or similar)
Experience designing search and intelligence systems for B2B data, entity resolution, or structured/semi-structured datasets
Background in agentic frameworks: LangChain, LangGraph, or equivalent
AWS infrastructure experience: OpenSearch Service, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB
Prior experience in a startup or high-growth scaleup environment where you've shipped fast and owned outcomes end-to-end

How We Build

AI-Native, Not AI-Assisted

Firmable is built on an AI-native engineering philosophy — and we mean that literally. We don't use AI as a productivity tool bolted onto traditional workflows. AI is the workflow. Every engineer at Firmable is expected to operate with fully agentic development, testing, and review pipelines as their default mode of working.

This means:

Agentic development: features are designed, scaffolded, and iterated with AI agents doing the heavy lifting — you direct, review, and elevate
AI-powered test generation: test coverage is driven by AI agents that understand context, not manual test-writing as an afterthought
Automated code review: AI-assisted review pipelines flag issues, suggest improvements, and maintain standards before humans ever look at a PR
Continuous AI feedback loops: traces, evals, and observability are built in from day one — not retrofitted later

If you're not already working this way, this role will require a rapid and genuine mindset shift. We're not looking for people who are open to AI-native development — we're looking for people who already live it.

The Environment

Firmable runs lean and ships fast — intentionally small teams, no layers, minimal process, and a weekly release cadence moving toward daily. Teams own their stack end to end: you design it, you build it, you ship it, you run it.

This is a startup-to-scaleup environment and it comes with real expectations. There are no fixed hours. The pace is high, the team is always building, and when something matters it gets done. In return, you get genuine ownership, a seat at the table on every major architecture decision, and the opportunity to build something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the market.

Why This Role

Own the most critical system at one of the fastest-growing B2B startups — you're not contributing to a team, you're leading the function
Greenfield architectural latitude — the next generation of our search and intelligence stack is largely unbuilt; you'll shape it
Work at the frontier — agentic search, real-time signal processing, and context-driven personalisation at scale are genuinely hard, genuinely novel problems
Small team, massive leverage — your work reaches every Firmable customer, every day
Competitive base + meaningful equity — we balance strong compensation with a share in the upside we're building toward