Sr. Data Scientist, Retrieval & Agentic Systems

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Madrid

Compensation: €95,000 - €115,000 / year

Description

Location: Madrid, Spain

Annual Remuneration: €95,000 - €115,000 and discretionary annual bonus

Pay Frequency: Monthly

Probationary Period: 180 days

Work Arrangement: Hybrid, 3-days per week

TL;DR Kharon is seeking a full-time Sr. Data Scientist, Retrieval & Agentic Systems based in Madrid.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Own and advance content discovery in Corestream, improving how customers find, explore, and engage with relevant risk intelligence, while helping shape the technical direction of discovery capabilities across Kharon's products.
Redesigning and improving Kharon's hybrid search capabilities, opening new avenues for content discovery — drawing on modern approaches including BM25 tuning, semantic distance, RAG, reranking, and graph-based signals that go beyond traditional semantic similarity.
Explore and build new discovery experiences, including agentic search, intelligent content categorization, personalized feeds, and systems that surface relevant connections across large collections of intelligence.
Driving the evolution of Kharon's narrative generation pipeline — how we take graph and analytical data and transform it into compelling, accurate written intelligence for customers.
Own problems end to end, from identifying opportunities and evaluating approaches to prototyping, implementing, deploying, and continuously improving production systems.
Collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Engineering, influencing priorities and architectural decisions while maintaining a strong hands-on contribution.

QUALIFICATIONS:

A proven interest or experience in global security, financial crimes, sanctions, export controls, or related domains
3+ years of experience in Data Science, AI Engineering, ML Engineering, or related software engineering roles
Hands-on experience in information retrieval, including experience with some combination of lexical search, embeddings, vector search, hybrid retrieval, ranking, reranking, and retrieval evaluation
Practical experience building LLM-powered applications, RAG pipelines, or agentic workflows.
Strong Python skills and the software engineering ability to take an idea from prototype to a reliable, maintainable production implementation
Demonstrated initiative and technical ownership — a track record of tackling ambiguous problems independently, challenging assumptions, and driving solutions forward while working with stakeholders
Curiosity and a willingness to experiment with emerging approaches while maintaining a pragmatic focus on what actually works
Bonus: Experience with graph-aware search or integrating knowledge graph outputs into retrieval systems

ABOUT KHARON:

Kharon operates at the nexus of global security and is on a mission to revolutionize the current landscape. We take complex data as it relates to global security and empower our clients to not only understand the risk associated with their potential business relationships but to operationalize that data so that they can make the best and most informed decisions possible.

From financial crimes and sanctions to export controls and threat identifications, our tools optimize protection against the types of risks that could otherwise be incredibly dangerous and excessively costly to any business. Serving many of today’s leading global financial and multinational institutions, Kharon products are the most powerful in the space with a precision and depth that is absolutely unparalleled.

When you look at any major global crisis event, we’re providing intelligence that’s at the heart of those circumstances. We connect the dots in a way that’s meaningful. As the world continues to evolve in complexity, so too does the demand for our products. Given the significance of our work and the increasing global reliance on our insights, we are looking for a Sr. Data Scientist, Retrieval & Agentic Systems to join us as we work to shape the way businesses perceive and navigate global risks.

Disclosures

Kharon is committed to cultivating and maintaining a workplace that is free from harassment and discrimination. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation or identity, neurodiversity, appearances, age, protected veteran status, or status as a qualified individual with disability.

You must have the right to work in Europe and Spain. Kharon is unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

By applying for this position, you acknowledge that Kharon will process your personal data for recruitment purposes in accordance with applicable data protection laws, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation and Spanish data protection legislation. For information about how we collect, use, store, and protect your personal data, please review our Candidate Privacy Notice at You have the right to access, correct, or request deletion of your data, to object to or restrict its processing, and to lodge a complaint with the Spanish data protection authority, the AEPD, at To exercise your rights, contact us at apply@kharon.com.

If your application is unsuccessful, your data will be retained for up to 12 months before being securely deleted. If you accept a role, your data will transfer to your employee record.

Sr. Data Scientist, Retrieval & Agentic Systems

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