Senior Software Engineer, Search Relevance

Company Description

Reverb is the largest online marketplace dedicated to buying and selling new, used, and vintage musical instruments. Since launching in 2013, Reverb has grown into a vibrant community of buyers and sellers all over the world. By focusing on inspiring content, price transparency, musician-focused e-commerce tools, a music-savvy customer service team, and more, Reverb has created an online destination where the global music community can connect over the perfect piece of music gear.

We love working at Reverb because we’re making the world more musical—through our marketplace and through Reverb Gives, which provides musical instruments to youth music education programs. We were named a “Best Place to Work” by Built in Chicago and a “Top Workplace'' by the Chicago Tribune.

Job Description

This is a full-time position in the newly-formed Search team, with the directive to take Reverb’s search to the next level and beyond. This role is right for you if you want to be a technical leader of a foundational team and enjoy applying technical skills to solve customer challenges. You must have an understanding of how sophisticated, high scale search systems work; bonus points for having previously worked on maturing a search codebase beyond vanilla search engine capabilities. Future work for this team may include:

• Tracking success metrics and setting baselines for search relevancy
• Working with data science, engineering, and analytics engineering to improve search ranking and efficacy.
• Building second-pass ranking systems to augment initial elastic search relevance
• Using taxonomy to inform raking and recall
• Overall improvements to the speed and stability of the search architecture

Here are the qualities we look for in our potential hires:

Product ownership - We are not just software engineers. At Reverb, you’ll be encouraged to follow the performance of features and systems you release, talk to product, research and design. Fix bugs and understand your impact on the business.

Self-motivation - Taking the initiative to get things done by finding ways around potential roadblocks and proactively working with other team members to find right-sized solutions. You own your work.

Learning and Teaching - You are someone who likes to participate in code reviews and mentor other engineers directly. You also enjoy new challenges and learning new things to help you do your work more effectively.

This role is open to remote candidates within multiple states, as well as candidates local to Chicago, IL. For candidates who will work remotely visit this link for a list of approved locations.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, with an emphasis on back-end systems
• Direct experience shipping features within the search domain.
• Practical understanding of data science and ML concepts.
• Deep knowledge of your chosen languages and frameworks, but curiosity and ability to ramp up on new technologies quickly when called for.
• Ability to lead and break down complex problems into bite sized solutions.
• Great communication skills and the desire to collaborate across departments and with internal customers. Able to ask clarifying questions and provide tech context when needed

Additional Information

Reverb offers compensation packages that include base, bonus, and equity in the form of Etsy restricted stock units. Some of our key benefits include but are not limited to the following:

• 100% paid premiums for medical, dental, and vision coverage for the employee, spouse or domestic partner, and all eligible dependents. Medical coverage includes gender affirming care.
• Life, AD&D, and supplemental long-and short-term disability insurance
• A matching 401(k)
• A generous PTO policy that includes vacation, sick/mental health days plus 11 paid holidays and two floating holidays
• Professional development and continued learning opportunities through access to mentoring, 1:1 coaching, and platforms like Skillsoft, LinkedIn Learning and Codecademy 
• 18 weeks of gender-neutral parental leave for the birth or adoption of a child
• Up to $25,000 reimbursement of adoption and/or surrogacy related expenses
• Paid sabbatical program
• $1,000 annual work/life stipend
• Access to free supplemental online mental health services and meditation apps Ways to give back to your community through a charitable contribution match and volunteer time off

We're embracing a flexible work model, which empowers our people to do their best work一wherever they are. You can learn more about this approach throughout ou