Software Engineering Lead

About the role

We are looking for a Tech Lead with deep search experience to provide hands-on technical leadership for the Search Experience team. In this role, you will guide the design and delivery of scalable search and retrieval systems, lead a group of engineers, and serve as a key technical partner to product, platform, and research stakeholders. You will balance writing high-quality code with leading technical execution — shaping architectural decisions, unblocking delivery, and ensuring our search platform evolves to meet the demands of diverse products and users. This role sits between senior engineers and principal-level leadership, with strong ownership of outcomes and day-to-day technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Providing technical leadership for the Search Experience team, guiding design and implementation of shared search and retrieval systems.
• Owning the technical delivery of search platform initiatives, ensuring solutions meet requirements for scalability, relevance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Leading our shared search platform — expanding content search and improving relevance through vector and lexical search techniques.
• Designing and developing scalable search services, data processing workflows, and microservices using technologies such as Elasticsearch, Spark, and Airflow.
• Writing clean, modular, and testable code in Python and/or Java, aligned with architecture guidelines and engineering standards.
• Mentoring and supporting engineers through pairing, code reviews, and technical coaching.
• Proactively identifying technical risks, dependencies, and bottlenecks, and drive them to resolution.
• Contributing to cross-team alignment, ensuring the search platform integrates cleanly with broader product and AI ecosystems.

Requirements

• Current expertise with Lucene, Elasticsearch, Solr, or similar search engines, with industry experience in semantic and lexical search.
• Demonstrated experience acting as a technical lead on complex backend or search platform systems.
• Past experience building and scaling search systems in production environments.
• Current and extensive development skills in Python and/or Java; Scala is a plus.
• Solid backend engineering fundamentals: API design, data modelling, distributed systems, and performance tuning.
• Proven ability to balance hands-on development with technical leadership and cross-functional coordination.
• Experience with Agile or Kanban teams, collaborating across functions.
• Experience building or integrating AI/LLM-powered or GenAI applications.
• Proven ability to work with vector/embedding-based search and KNN algorithms.
• Exposure to graph-based data models or knowledge graph architecture.
• Experience working on internal developer platforms or shared infrastructure used by multiple teams.
• Knowledge of observability best practices for distributed data systems (e.g., metrics, logs, alerts).

Qualifications

Only candidates with Search Technology will be considered for this role.

Skills

Not specified

Benefits

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Pay

$115,400 - $192,300

Schedule

N/A