Senior Software Engineer - Search

Job Summary

As a Senior Software Engineer on our Search Services and Applications team, you’ll design and build cloud-based search services and applications across traditional and AI-powered search (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, NLP, vector search, and LLM-enabled experiences).

Essential Functions

• Design, implement, and review code for search services and applications;
• Apply sound design patterns and continuously improve quality.
• Partner with peers on design and implementation details and provide actionable feedback through code and design reviews.
• Participate in and contribute to Agile DevOps team activities. Effective in paired programming and working independently. Help drive clarity in planning. Contribute to task definition, prioritization, and assignment. Drive deliverables with a sense of urgency and ownership along with surfacing risks, mitigating them, and suggesting course corrections when appropriate.
• Own multiple products with a DevOps and service-ownership mindset. Deliver quality solutions with TDD, test automation, instrumentation, monitoring, secure/defensive coding, resiliency, and scalability.
• Select methods and procedures on new or special assignments collaboratively.
• Design, develop, review, and deliver application and service architecture for search (indexing, query, relevance, and retrieval pipelines).
• Implement and optimize OpenSearch/Elasticsearch indices, analyzers, mappings, and query DSL to improve relevance, latency, and cost.
• Build and operate vector search capabilities (embeddings generation, indexing, kNN search) and hybrid retrieval (keyword + vector), including evaluation and tuning.
• Contribute to LLM-enabled search experiences (e.g., RAG, reranking, query rewriting, and answer grounding) with a focus on safety, latency, and measurable relevance.
• Collaborate on work with the team and contributing teams. Engage in cross-functional teams and ensure successful project and/or product delivery. Contribute improvements to shared resources and engineering practices (internal libraries, tooling, documentation, and operational runbooks) that help the team deliver reliably.
• Make sound technical decisions, drive alignment through clear options/trade-offs, and unblock delivery within the search domain.

Minimum Requirements

• Technical Expertise: Design and deliver robust, scalable backend services in Java and/or Python on AWS, including search-heavy workloads. Hands-on experience integrating AI capabilities into products (e.g., embeddings, LLMs, NLP, reranking) and operating them in production.
• Experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch: index design (mappings/analyzers), ingestion, query DSL, and performance/relevance tuning.
• Ability to design relevance experiments and evaluate quality using offline metrics (e.g., NDCG/precision/recall) and online signals (A/B tests, click/engagement data).
• Experience with vector search and/or RAG systems: embedding pipelines, hybrid retrieval, prompt design/guardrails, and observability for latency and quality.
• Leadership & Strategy: Assess business value, trade-offs, risks, and technical constraints during discovery and planning. Help drive the technical direction for AI-driven search and backend services within the team, aligning designs with product goals. Lead or contribute to architectural reviews and clearly communicate recommendations and trade-offs. Evaluate and recommend new technologies to add to the stack. Stay current with industry trends and emerging technologies.
• Team Development: Mentor junior software engineers across one or more functional areas. Help foster an inclusive environment where team members are motivated to succeed with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Share technical expertise and knowledge on relevant topics. Contribute to the team’s technical direction by proposing improvements, sharing learnings, and raising the bar on engineering practices.
• Communication & Collaboration: Work effectively with product leaders, executives, and cross-functional teams to align on goals and architecture. Serve as a technical lead for a project(s) or component(s), coordinating with partners to deliver on time. Provide complete, actionable, and timely technical feedback. Articulate technical decisions with clear rationale in design meetings and discussions. Adapt communication of complex technical topics to different audiences.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Experience

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.

Supervision

• N/A

Certifications

• N/A

Language Skills

• Ability to read, analyze and interpret general business periodicals, professional journals, technical procedures or governmental regulations.
• Ability to write reports, business correspondence and procedure manuals.
• Ability to effectively present information and respond to questions from a variety of both internal and external sources.

Physical Capabilities

• Sit;
• Use hands to finger, handle, or feel;
• Reach with hands and arms;
• Talk or hear;
• Occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds;
• Standard categories