Jobs · Engineering · Illinois

Staff Software Engineer – Elasticsearch Platform

Appathon.Ai · Chicago, IL · 2 mo ago
EngineeringContract

About the role

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll lead the design and evolution of a real-time search platform—the engine powering creator discovery across 30M profiles and billions of posts. You’ll architect and maintain Elasticsearch clusters, build high-performance APIs in Go, and ensure the scalability and reliability of search at massive scale. This role blends hands-on development with technical leadership, guiding architecture decisions and mentoring engineers to deliver a fast, reliable, and high-impact search experience for clients.

Responsibilities

  • Develop and enhance backend services to meet evolving product requirements, ensuring robust, scalable, and high-performance solutions.
  • Contribute across the entire product lifecycle—from design and development to deployment, optimization, and scaling.
  • Design, implement, and maintain Elasticsearch environments aligned with performance, reliability, and scalability goals.
  • Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Architects, and Engineering teams to understand user needs and translate business requirements into technical solutions.
  • Write clean, testable, and maintainable code while upholding engineering best practices.
  • Participate in code reviews, architecture discussions, and continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Drive technical excellence and foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and collaboration within the engineering team.
  • Mentor and support engineers through technical guidance and architectural leadership.

Requirements

  • 7–10+ years of professional software development experience with a strong Computer Science foundation.
  • 3+ years of recent hands-on experience with Elasticsearch (or similar search technologies).
  • Proven ability to design, build, and operate complex distributed systems and high-load services.
  • Deep understanding of Elasticsearch architecture, performance tuning, and operational best practices.
  • Experience with AWS services and cloud-native application development.
  • Strong Golang development experience, or demonstrated ability and willingness to quickly learn and adopt Go.
  • Solid understanding of:
    • Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
    • Database concepts (RDBMS and NoSQL)
    • Networking fundamentals and distributed system interactions
  • Experience developing RESTful APIs and working with modern web application frameworks.
  • Proficiency in one or more of the following technologies:
    • Python
    • PHP
    • JavaScript (Node.js)
    • Java
  • Experience building scalable, high-performance backend services.
  • Familiarity with:
    • CI/CD pipelines
    • Agile development methodologies
    • Git-based version control workflows
  • Strong verbal and written English communication skills in a global team environment.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with frameworks such as:
    • Laravel
    • Symfony
    • Other enterprise-grade application frameworks
  • Cloud certifications or hands-on experience with:
    • AWS
    • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
    • Microsoft Azure
  • Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes.
  • Passion for continuous learning and staying current with emerging technologies and industry trends.

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