Staff Software Engineer, Search

SiriusXM and its brands (Pandora, SiriusXM Media, AdsWizz, Simplecast, and SiriusXM Connect) are leading a new era of audio entertainment and services by delivering the most compelling subscription and ad-supported audio experiences for listeners — in the car, at home, and anywhere on the go with connected devices. Our vision is to shape the future of audio, where everyone can be effortlessly connected to the voices, stories, and music they love. We bring together emerging talent and legends to share authentic content through industry-leading programming and technology, encompassing music, sports, comedy, news, talk, live events, and podcasting.

About the role

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will help make SiriusXM’s massive content catalog easily discoverable across automotive and mobile platforms. You’ll work on the core search infrastructure that powers how millions of users find content every day. In this role, you’ll design, scale, and evolve distributed search systems that retrieve high-quality results at scale. You’ll drive architectural decisions, own complex, business-critical components, and establish best practices as the team and platform grow. You’ll also explore new ML models, re-architect search services, and improve scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in ambiguity, is technically pragmatic, and can make strong architectural decisions in real-world conditions.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate well-architected, scalable microservices for the search services stack.
• Drive architectural evolution of indexing, retrieval, and serving pipelines from prototype to production.
• Evaluate, fine-tune, and integrate off-the-shelf LLM models, rapidly prototyping where needed.
• Drive cross-functional initiatives, collaborating with product, science, design, and infrastructure partners.
• Act as a strong technical bridge between science/ML and engineering teams.
• Partner with the Voice Search team to eliminate redundancies and enhance the overall search ecosystem.
• Influence and uphold engineering best practices, mentoring other engineers as the team scales.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale backend systems in Java, including backend microservices and scalable distributed systems.
• 3+ years of experience with Python.
• Deep experience with search frameworks, metadata indexing, and retrieval systems.
• Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional technical initiatives.
• Expert-level experience with AWS, including deploying applications using services such as EC2, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, ElastiCache, and IAM.
• Strong foundation in object-oriented design, system design, and design patterns.
• Proven ability to make sound architectural trade-offs while maintaining long-term extensibility.
• Comfort working across system boundaries (infrastructure, ML, and adjacent service domains).
• Ability to handle multiple tasks in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
• Willingness to take initiative and follow through on projects.
• Excellent time management skills, with the ability to prioritize and multitask under shifting deadlines.
• Must have legal right to work in the U.S.

Pay

We expect the base salary for this position to be in the range of $101,500 to $195,000 and will depend on your skills, qualifications, and experience. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives.