Staff Software Engineer — Search Platform, API & Infrastructure

About the role

The Advanced Content Engineering (ACE) team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and delivery of the search platform's control-plane API and cloud infrastructure. The platform's core promise is self-service: internal client teams must be able to create a search system, configure an ingestion topology, promote a new index to production, and monitor system health—entirely through APIs—without requiring direct involvement from the platform team.

This is a high-ownership, high-leverage position at the intersection of platform engineering, API design, and cloud infrastructure. Staff Engineers on this team define, build, test, deploy, scale, and operate what they ship—full-stack ownership is the baseline, not a bonus. Delivery friction is treated as an urgent engineering problem: the team ships to production constantly, AI-assisted development is the norm, and removing obstacles to fast, safe delivery is everyone’s responsibility.

The successful candidate brings enterprise-grade security instincts, deep AWS expertise, and a product-minded approach to developer experience—treating the platform's API as a product in its own right.

Responsibilities

• Focus on: Platform Control-Plane API
• Plan, design, develop, and own the platform’s management API— the self-service interface through which client teams create and configure search systems, manage ingestion topologies, register reusable components, promote index versions, and monitor system health— resolving problems of diverse scope with innovative thinking and little or no precedent to guide solutions.
• Architect the platform’s multi-tenant access model: implement strict data isolation between client tenants, integrate with enterprise identity providers, establish role-based access control across all API endpoints, and define the governance framework that ensures the platform can make credible security commitments to enterprise customers.
• Design and expose the API surface required to support the platform’s evaluation and experimentation workflows— including endpoints that enable the search grading tool to consume experiment run outputs, query/result pairs, and relevance judgments, and that allow client teams to configure and trigger A/B search experiments through self-service interfaces.
• Design the configuration data model and persistence layer (DynamoDB and related services) that stores search system definitions, component registry entries, index lifecycle state, and audit logs— applying architectural patterns that scale to the platform’s multi-tenant and multi-region ambitions.
• Break down complex business requirements into functional and technical requirements with consideration for security, ethical AI implementation, and operational efficiency; contribute to recommendations where technology transformation can spark business growth.
• Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps
• Own the platform’s AWS infrastructure as code— defining, provisioning, and maintaining ECS services, MSK clusters, OpenSearch/Vespa deployments, DynamoDB tables, networking (VPC, security groups, NAT), and IAM roles using Terraform or AWS CDK— establishing infrastructure governance standards and a cloud strategy for multi-environment and eventual multi-region operation.
• Design and own the CI/CD pipeline for platform services— establishing DevOps culture and toolchain strategy for the team, with a clear mandate to eliminate delivery friction: the team ships to production constantly, and any obstacle to doing so safely is an engineering problem to be solved, not a process to be accepted.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted development practices across the team’s infrastructure and API work— establishing the tooling, patterns, and norms that enable engineers to leverage AI to move faster while maintaining the quality and reliability bar the platform demands.
• Implement and operate customer-controlled encryption key (CMK) support— applying security strategy, risk assessment frameworks, and security governance to give enterprise clients control over their encryption keys while preserving multi-tenant reliability.
• Reliability Engineering
• Define and own platform-level SLOs covering API availability, query latency, ingestion throughput, and end-to-end document freshness— and build the monitoring infrastructure (CloudWatch, distributed tracing, alerting) that makes SLO compliance continuously visible to the team and to client teams.
• Design the observability infrastructure for agentic retrieval paths— where standard request/response logging is insufficient: implement trace-level instrumentation that captures tool invocation sequences, per-hop latency, and retrieval inputs, enabling reliable diagnosis of failures and quality regressions in non-deterministic agent workflows.
• Take full operational responsibility for platform API and infrastructure— you built it, you own it, you run it: triage and resolve incidents, write thorough post-mortems, and drive systematic improvements that prevent recurrence.
• Technical Leadership
• Establish architectural principles and cross-system design patterns for the platform’s control plane and infrastructure— functioning as the technical authority that other engineers and teams turn to for API and infrastructure guidance.
• Lead significant projects and business initiatives that span multiple engineers and interact with partner teams; determine work priorities and make adjustments to short-term priorities while maintaining strategic focus; provide specialist advice to senior management on complex infrastructure and security issues.
• Mentor and develop Senior and mid-level engineers— providing coaching, technical direction, and educational opportunities in cloud infrastructure, platform API design, reliability engineering, and AI-assisted development practices.
• Engage with client teams as a technical partner— understanding their integration experience and pain points, feeding structured requirements back into the platform API roadmap, and proactively reducing time-to-value for new platform adopters.

Qualifications

You’re an ideal fit if you have:

• A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated progression to staff-level or equivalent technical leadership— including ownership of a functional area and leadership of significant cross-functional projects
• Deep expertise in cloud-native platform and infrastructure engineering on AWS: VPC architecture, IAM, ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB, MSK, and related managed services— with hands-on infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform and/or AWS CDK) and the ability to establish infrastructure governance frameworks
• Production experience with OpenSearch, Vespa, or Elasticsearch at an operational level— cluster sizing, backup and restore, index lifecycle management, and multi-tenant access controls
• Mastery of Python with strategic awareness of language selection and migration; strong software engineering fundamentals including testing architecture, security architecture, and system design
• Demonstrated enterprise security practice: security strategy, risk assessment frameworks, least-privilege IAM, secrets management, encryption at rest and in transit, and compliance implementation in production cloud environments
• Experience establishing API governance frameworks, cross-system integration patterns, and documentation standards; experience designing multi-tenant SaaS-style platform APIs with versioning, access control, and first-class developer experience
• Track record of establishing reliability engineering ownership: SLO definition, observability implementation, on-call leadership, and a track record of improving platform reliability through data-driven retrospectives— with a clear philosophy that shipping frequently and operating reliably are complementary, not in tension
• Comfort and fluency with AI-assisted development tools; you use them to move faster and produce higher-quality infrastructure and API code, and you actively help the team do the same