Software Engineer - Search Infrastructure

USD 150,000-400,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ On-site

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI @ 4 Data Pipelines Debugging Distributed Systems @ 6 ElasticSearch @ 4 JVM @ 6 Networking @ 4 Performance Optimization Rust @ 6

Details

The team builds AI systems that understand the universe and support humanity's pursuit of knowledge. As a backend engineer, you will design and build scalable, high-performance systems supporting subscriptions infrastructure, monetized products, user growth, and creator monetization. The role involves mission-critical infrastructure that processes millions of transactions, optimizes user acquisition and retention, and enables creators to earn a living through their content.

Responsibilities

Design and build large-scale search infrastructure, including real-time indexing, serving, and data pipelines, handling massive write and query loads with strict latency and reliability requirements.
Develop deep expertise in search internals, including indexing, query execution, and relevance, and help shape the technical direction of core search infrastructure.
Operate production services end to end, including monitoring, debugging, incident response, and performance optimization.
Lead and drive incident response and recovery with peers.
Review and contribute to incident postmortems while maintaining a high standard for operational excellence.

Requirements

5+ years of experience developing large-scale infrastructure or distributed systems, or experience with storage or hardware architecture.
Proficiency in high-performance Rust, C++, or JVM-based languages.
Hands-on experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, or similar, with an understanding of how they work and why.
Experience with operating system internals, filesystems, networking, or database storage engines.
Strong focus on performance, reliability, scalability, and quality.
Ability to take full ownership of problems and learn whatever is needed to solve them.
Comfortable working quickly in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities and tight deadlines.