Senior Software Development Engineer, Discovery Services

Position: Senior Software Development Engineer, IMDb Discovery Services
Design and build the search, ranking, and list systems behind IMDb - the platform hundreds of millions of people use to find movies, shows, and talent. As a senior engineer, you'll own the architecture for core areas of discovery and lead the work to turn these systems into an AI-powered discovery engine built on IMDb's structured data: titles, people, credits, and the relationships between them.

- Own distributed services handling billions of requests across , , and partner channels
- Lead development and strategy of key system features on IMDb's Discovery platforms, driving intent-based search and AI/ML-powered ranking
- Set engineering standards, mentor engineers, and own your services end to end in productionIMDb is the world's most popular source for information on movies, TV shows, and celebrities. IMDb Discovery Services builds the search, list, and ranking platform that helps hundreds of millions of customers find, explore, and connect with the titles and talent they care about. We own real-time suggestion search across , , and affiliated domains;

main and advanced search; charts and discovery widgets; the user list platform; and the ranking systems behind STARmeter, MOVIE meter, and TVmeter. These services handle billions of requests and sit at the heart of the IMDb experience, powering IMDb Consumer, IMDbPro, and a growing set of partner and AI-assistant channels.

We're evolving this platform into an AI-native discovery engine: intelligent retrieval that understands intent, lists that surface as a discovery experience rather than personal storage, and self-service integration so downstream teams onboard through typed SDKs and versioned contracts. Our search stack is built on AWS Open Search Service, and relevance, latency, and scale are first-class engineering concerns. Every generative and agentic experience is grounded in IMDb's structured entity graph of titles, names, credits, and verified relationships — data no competitor has at this depth.

As a Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE) on this team, you'll own architecture for one or more of these areas, lead multi-engineer efforts where the customer problem is clear but the technical strategy is not, and set the engineering standard others build to. The work sits at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, information retrieval and machine learning, and a uniquely valuable data set.

Key job responsibilities
- Lead the development and technical strategy of key system features for IMDb's search platform on AWS Open Search Service - index design, relevance tuning, query performance, and scaling.

- Own the architecture for a significant area of the discovery platform (search/retrieval, ranking, or the list platform), providing a system-wide view and design guidance across the team.

- Lead the design and delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects end to end - scoping, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations - breaking work into parallel streams and integrating it into a coherent whole.

- Build intelligent retrieval and ML-powered ranking, plus platform capabilities (API contracts, versioned SLOs, typed SDKs) for downstream and AI-agent consumers.

- Raise the operational bar: own alarms, telemetry, runbooks, and COE practices, balancing velocity against reliability on the critical path.

- Review designs and code across the team to ensure solutions are well-designed, extensible, performant, and secure; drive adoption of engineering best practices.

- Identify and resolve architecture deficiencies and systemic operational issues, including those where the platform bottlenecks other teams' innovation.

- Mentor engineers and partner with product and program management to shape the discovery roadmap.

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