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.

Responsibilities

• Plan, design, develop, and own the platform’s management API—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—designing versioned, backward-compatible interfaces with clear contracts, comprehensive documentation, and developer-experience patterns drawn from best-in-class search platform providers—and set governance standards that the team follows for all future API surface.
• 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.
• Own infrastructure cost management: monitor AWS spend across platform components, evaluate architectural trade-offs at the system level, and implement an enterprise performance and optimization framework that keeps the platform’s economics sustainable as it scales—implementing compute cost governance for inference workloads as custom model serving is introduced.
• Define and own platform-level SLOs covering API availability, query latency, ingestion throughput, and end-to-end document freshness—building the monitoring infrastructure (CloudWatch, distributed tracing, alerting) that makes SLO compliance continuously visible to the team and to client teams.
• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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.
• Experience operating Kafka (MSK) or other distributed messaging infrastructure in production, including partition management, consumer group monitoring, and schema registry governance.
• Experience building developer-facing internal platforms where API quality and documentation are treated as first-class product concerns.
• Track record of 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.
• 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.

Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes or ECS container orchestration, including service mesh, autoscaling, and health check patterns.
• Familiarity with distributed tracing infrastructure for non-deterministic or agentic workflows—where trace design must capture tool call sequences and per-hop context, not just request/response pairs.
• Familiarity with AI service architecture: evaluating AI vendors, cost-benefit analysis, and integrating AI API services with fallback strategies into production platform infrastructure.