Staff Software Engineer (Search Platform)

Join our team as a Staff Software Engineer on the Search Platform. In this hands-on technical leadership role, you will be the senior technical owner of the Search Engine, the Indexing Pipeline, and Availability. You will set technical direction, lead the design and implementation of the indexing pipeline and query-serving stack, and shape ranking and relevance strategy. This is a rare opportunity to lead a search platform build at a company with significant scale and a rich problem domain.

• As a Staff Software Engineer on the Search team, you will be responsible for leading the design and implementation of the indexing pipeline and query-serving stack, shaping ranking and relevance strategy.
• You will own the architecture of the Search Engine, the Indexing Pipeline, and Availability, ensuring the quality of the search architecture, the freshness of the index, and the accuracy of delivery eligibility.
• You will partner with Platform Engineering and downstream consumers at the integration boundaries, guiding the team's execution and building parts of the platform.
• Excellent written and verbal communication around collaborative system design and technical decision-making
• A pragmatic, collaborative mindset with strong ownership and systems thinking
• Familiarity with geospatial systems and spatial filtering is a plus
• Strong instincts for relevance and ranking, with the ability to translate product goals into ranking signals and evaluate them with data
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Experience with real-time data pipelines (Kafka, event streaming) for search indexing
• Deep experience designing, building, and tuning search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, Vespa, or equivalent); experience leading a major search re-architecture or building from scratch is strongly preferred; Vespa experience is a significant plus
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, or equivalent) is a plus
• Strong proficiency in Go, or a willingness to adopt it as a primary language