Senior Software Engineer - Search

Job Title

Senior Software Engineer - Search

As a Senior Software Engineer on our Search Services and Applications team, you’ll design and build cloud-based search services and applications across traditional and AI‑powered search (Open Search/Elasticsearch, NLP, vector search, and LLM‑enabled experiences). You’ll be hands‑on in delivering high‑quality software while providing technical ownership within the team through strong design, code reviews, and pragmatic decision‑making. You’ll help shape and execute the technical direction for our search products by contributing to architectural decisions that balance innovation with scalability and reliability.

This includes evaluating new capabilities (e.g., hybrid retrieval, embeddings, reranking, and query understanding), running proof‑of‑concepts, and participating in design reviews to ensure we build the right solutions for relevance, performance, and operability. Your days will be a blend of hands‑on engineering writing code, utilizing agentic AI, improving tests, performance tuning, and troubleshooting production issues. You’ll work closely with product and cross‑functional partners to translate requirements into well‑designed services and features, and you’ll own components end‑to‑end with a Dev Ops mindset (instrumentation, monitoring, reliability, and cost awareness).

This role is ideal if you enjoy solving complex relevance and distributed‑systems problems, thrive in a collaborative environment, and want to have a direct impact on how we build and scale search technology.

• Design, implement, and review code for search services and applications; apply sound design patterns and continuously improve quality.
• Partner with peers on design and implementation details and provide actionable feedback through code and design reviews.
• Participate in and contribute to Agile Dev Ops team activities; effectively pair program and work independently.
• Help drive clarity in planning. Contribute to task definition, prioritization, and assignment. Drive deliverables with a sense of urgency and ownership along with surfacing risks, mitigating them, and suggesting course corrections when appropriate.
• Own multiple products with a Dev Ops and service‑ownership mindset. Deliver quality solutions with TDD, test automation, instrumentation, monitoring, secure/defensive coding, resiliency, and scalability.
• Select methods and procedures on new or special assignments collaboratively.
• Design, develop, review, and deliver application and service architecture for search (indexing, query, relevance, and retrieval pipelines). Architecture for search applications and services.
• Implement and optimize Open Search/Elasticsearch indices, analyzers, mappings, and query DSL to improve relevance, latency, and cost.
• Build and operate vector search capabilities (embeddings generation, indexing, kNN search) and hybrid retrieval (keyword + vector), including evaluation and tuning.
• Contribute to LLM‑enabled search experiences (e.g., RAG, reranking, query rewriting, and answer grounding) with a focus on safety, latency, and measurable relevance.
• Collaborate on work with the team and contributing teams.
• Engage in cross‑functional teams and ensure successful project and/or product delivery.
• Contribute improvements to shared resources and engineering practices (internal libraries, tooling, documentation, and operational runbooks) that help the team deliver reliably.
• Make sound technical decisions, drive alignment through clear options/trade‑offs, and unblock delivery within the search domain impact and influence across multiple teams and domains.

• Design and deliver robust, scalable backend services in Java and/or Python on AWS, including search‑heavy workloads.
• Hands‑on experience integrating AI capabilities into products (e.g., embeddings, LLMs, NLP, reranking) and operating them in production.
• Experience with Open Search or Elasticsearch: index design (mappings/analyzers), ingestion, query DSL, and performance/relevance tuning.
• Ability to design relevance experiments and evaluate quality using offline metrics (e.g.,…