Software Engineer — Search Platform, API & Infrastructure

Overview of the Role

Advanced Content Engineering (ACE) 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.

Building, operating, and continuously improving that self‑service experience is the heart of this role.

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.

In this position, you will focus on:

• 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. Resolve 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.
• Establish API strategy and cross‑system integration patterns — 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.
• 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 (Dynamo
  
  DB 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.

• Own the platform’s AWS infrastructure as code — defining, provisioning, and maintaining ECS services, MSK clusters, Open Search/Vespa deployments, Dynamo
  
  DB 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 Dev Ops 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,…