Sr Software Engineer (Search & Recommendations) Java/Typescript-Austin, TX

About the role

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll work with the Search and Recommendations team. Our team is responsible for the search and recommendation experiences that power product discovery across H-E-B Digital. We help millions of Texans find the products they need through intelligent search, personalization, ranking and recommendation systems. You'll work on complex engineering challenges involving relevance, query understanding, experimentation and AI-driven experiences at grocery scale.

Location: Austin

Responsibilities

• Works on technology projects / tasks with limited or no guidance
• Writes production-ready code and tests that meet acceptance criteria, are easily testable, documented, easily understood by other developers, and account for edge cases, security, and errors
• Creating, configuring, and supporting build and deployment pipelines
• Leads others in coding / configuration / maintaining / testing / debugging existing or new systems; delivers quality features and bug fixes that align with our development process
• Capable of leading team on effective production support or on-call, debugging, and troubleshooting highly complex issues within team services
• Able to identify a path to resolution for most issues for team services
• Demonstrates ownership of team services and influences the team
• Starts to learn how to influence across teams
• Fosters growth environment through mentorship and open collaboration with peers
• Recommends and drives changes to processes and tools at the team level aligned with the organization and company goals
• Reviews epics critically and ensures dependencies are identified, they're appropriately broken down and prioritized, and well understood by the team and stakeholders
• Drives priority setting and urgency in alignment with organizational strategy
• Anticipates and communicates blockers, delays, and cost ballooning for their work before they require escalation
• Ensures expectations within their team are clarified between all parties involved
• Leads team ceremonies and larger team efforts
• Drives improvements within assigned team
• Expert knowledge in their area of focus and mentors others
• Fosters a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing within their team and with their team's business stakeholders
• Leads root cause analysis and establishing action items for the RCA
• Learns to work with other teams to resolve issues involving dependent services
• Identifies and communicates cross-team dependencies
• Ensures system monitoring for team services is effective and adheres to best practices

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Experience building and evolving search, retrieval, ranking and recommendation capabilities that help customers discover products more effectively, leveraging AI-driven experiences to deliver relevant, personalized results at scale
• Strong experience developing backend services with Java
• Experience building APIs and microservices using TypeScript and Node.js
• Experience designing and supporting GraphQL APIs
• Experience building cloud-native applications in AWS
• Experience with infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform
• Experience with search technologies such as OpenSearch or Elasticsearch
• Experience working with NoSQL databases, including DynamoDB
• Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming platforms such as Kafka or Kinesis
• Strong understanding of software design, system architecture and distributed systems
• Experience working in Agile environments and modern CI/CD practices
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and integrating AI assistants into the software development lifecycle

Skills

• Advanced knowledge in system and data architecture, data modeling, and design and capable of architecting and designing at the application or service level using well-accepted design patterns
• Able to review platform designs for strength of engineering solutions, namely performance, sustainability, and iterative development potential
• Comprehensive knowledge of Computer Science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, design patterns, system architecture and design patterns
• Advanced understanding of development methodologies and processes
• Proficient at analyzing memory and performance issues using profiling tools
• Leverages Agile metrics to improve team performance and deliverables
• Evaluates and adjusts resources, self, and team as necessary
• Ability to work on tasks which span multiple domains, requiring cross-team collaboration, which have a high impact on your project
• Embraces risk, change, and helps team manage ambiguity within the team's scope of work. Able to drive progress without having a complete picture and can articulate potential tradeoffs and prioritize when faced with ambiguity
• Delivers clear, concise, effective messages across different levels; can tailor communication based on intended audience
• Fosters a culture of mentoring and coaching across multiple technical teams and other stakeholders
• Fosters a culture within their team where people are encouraged to share their opinions and contribute to discussions in a respectful manner, approach disagreement non-defensively with inquisitiveness, and use contradictory opinions as a basis for constructive, productive conversations

Physical Demands & Working Conditions

• Travel by car or plane with overnight stays
• Work extended hours; sit for extended periods
• Work rotating and on-call schedules, as needed