Sr Software Engineer (API, Search Engine, Java)

About this role:

Our mission is to create effortless, customer-centric, habit-forming digital experiences that enable clients to solve their mission critical priorities. We are seeking an experienced Sr. Search Engineer to help build and enhance a scalable, high-performance search platform. As data volumes grow and user queries become more complex, we need someone with deep expertise in search technologies like OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Apache Solr, or Lucene to push our infrastructure to the next level.

In this role, you'll focus on implementing advanced search capabilities, including vector search, natural language processing (NLP), and personalization, all aimed at improving search relevancy and user experience. You'll collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including data engineering, data science and cloud, to design robust search platform, data pipelines and integrate machine learning models that continuously refine search results. Strong knowledge of distributed systems, API development, and performance optimization will be key to succeeding in this role.

What you’ll do:

· Technical Collaboration & Leadership: Providing technical leadership in search technologies, guiding cross-functional projects with data science, engineering, and infrastructure teams.

· Developing Search Algorithms: Implementing advanced search algorithms leveraging search engine features such as vector search, natural language processing, personalization, and other state-of-the-art technologies.

· Relevancy Model Development: Collaborating with machine learning and data science teams to optimize relevancy models that improve user search experiences, incorporating feedback loops and behavioral data.

· Developing APIs: Writing APIs or services to integrate relevancy feature embeddings into the search engine, and developing efficient, real-time search query logic to capitalize on these embeddings.

· A/B Testing and Experimentation: Implementing frameworks for A/B testing to experiment with different search and relevancy approaches, measuring and analyzing the outcomes to drive continuous improvements.

· Infrastructure Optimization: Enhancing the search infrastructure to ensure scalability and robustness as the system grows in complexity and usage.

· Performance Tuning: Continuously testing and optimizing the performance of the search engine to improve query response times, accuracy, and relevancy based on defined metrics.

· Integration: Integrating the search infrastructure with other services and data platforms to enable seamless data retrieval, indexing, and search performance monitoring.

· Data Pipeline Management: Developing and maintaining scalable data pipelines to ensure efficient data flow, low-latency indexing, and real-time search capabilities.

· Data Analysis: Analyzing search patterns, user interactions, and relevancy metrics to refine search algorithms and improve the overall user experience.

· Search Result Tuning Based on Business Metrics: Collaborating with product and business teams to fine-tune search results to align with business goals like conversion, engagement, and retention.

· Contribute to the review and analysis of business requirements.

· Perform and participate in code reviews, peer inspections and technical design/specifications.

· Ensure code integrity standards and code best practice.

Must have:

· 5-8 years of post-college experience in Software engineering, API development or related fields. The candidate should have strong qualitative and quantitative problem-solving skills along with high on ownership and accountability.

· Experience with search engines such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Solr, or similar technologies, and proficiency in leveraging advanced techniques like vector search, NLP, and personalization to build sophisticated, multifaceted relevancy scoring systems.

· Strong understanding of concurrency patterns, experience building thread safe code, building highly performant code.

· Experience leading teams in building search applications from the scratch, migrating applications to different search engines.

· Proficiency in writing high quality production code, demonstrating strong software engineering expertise

· In-depth knowledge of relevancy metrics, including precision, recall, and DCG, and the ability to apply these metrics to improve search performance.

· Strong expertise in programming languages such as Java, Python used for search and data engineering solutions.

· Experience designing large-scale distributed systems, particularly custom search functionalities, and working with cloud technologies like AWS (e.g., EC2, S3, Lambdas, Kinesis).

· Experience with search analytics and monitoring tools like Dynatrace, and Datadog, used for tracking and improving search perf