Staff Software Engineer, Search & Query Infra

WHAT IS BOX?

Box (NYSE:BOX) is the leader in Intelligent Content Management. Our platform enables organizations to fuel collaboration, manage the entire content lifecycle, secure critical content, and transform business workflows with enterprise AI. We help companies thrive in the new AI-first era of business. Founded in 2005, Box simplifies work for leading global organizations, including AstraZeneca, JLL, Morgan Stanley, and Nationwide. Box is headquartered in Redwood City, CA, with offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

By joining Box, you will have the unique opportunity to continue driving our platform forward. Content powers how we work. It’s the billions of files and information flowing across teams, departments, and key business processes every single day: contracts, invoices, employee records, financials, product specs, marketing assets, and more. Our mission is to bring intelligence to the world of content management and empower our customers to completely transform workflows across their organizations. With the combination of AI and enterprise content, the opportunity has never been greater to transform how the world works together and at Box you will be on the front lines of this massive shift.

WHY BOX NEEDS YOU

The Search and Query Infrastructure team at Box owns and operates a highly scalable and performant platform to support fast, reliable, and secure discovery of enterprise content through both full-text search and metadata-based queries. We index petabytes of content and serve a high volume of queries with low latency and high availability. Our systems are the foundation of not only the Box Search experience, but also power BoxAI features that enable smarter, faster insights for our customers. We work on complex distributed systems problems involving data sharding, intelligent routing, global data replication, performance optimization, and near real-time indexing — all at scale. We operate mission-critical infrastructure and continuously innovate to improve search quality, speed, and relevance.

As we continue our mission to deliver a next-generation platform, we're looking for a Staff Engineer to join us and play a critical role in shaping the future of our platform. You'll have the opportunity to work with a small team of talented, collaborative and fun engineers, solving some of the toughest challenges, as we build out the future of content management in the cloud. The work you do will have an immediate impact on the productivity of millions of users, at some of the most important enterprises of our time.

WHAT YOU'LL DO 

• Define and drive technical strategy for Search and Query infrastructure to support the growing needs of Box customers, ensuring scalability, reliability, and efficiency at global scale.
• Tackle complex challenges related to data sharding, storage optimization, and global data replication to ensure scalability and performance.
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code, and participate in code and design reviews to maintain our high standards of quality.
• Develop innovative and robust tooling and automation around complex Elasticsearch operations.
• Mentor and elevate engineers across the organization, fostering a culture of technical excellence, knowledge sharing, and innovation.
• Participate in our on-call rotation while on-call, to help respond to and triage any issues that arise.

WHO YOU ARE

We are an AI-first company. This means you approach your work with a growth mindset and find ways to leverage AI to help make faster, smarter decisions that will 10X your impact at Box.

• You have 6+ years of professional experience in backend software development, with a proven track record of building and shipping complex, large-scale services.
• You possess deep expertise in designing and working with distributed systems, understanding the trade-offs between consistency, availability, and performance.
• You are proficient in one or more backend programming languages such as Java, Scala, Go, or Python.
• You thrive on tackling ambiguous, complex technical challenges and driving them to successful resolution.
• You have experience with data-intensive applications, search technologies (like Elasticsearch or Solr), and/or database and query systems (SQL or NoSQL).
• You are a product-minded engineer who thinks about the "why" behind the "what" and is passionate about solving customer problems.
• You have a strong sense of ownership and are comfortable working in a collaborative, fast-paced environment.
• You hold a BS in Computer Science or a related technical field, or have equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with public cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure) and containerization technologies (Kubernetes, Do