Staff Software Engineer
Lead the technical vision and architecture for Rippling's Search Platform, owning indexing, retrieval, relevance ranking, and query performance at scale. Requires 8+ years backend/platform engineering experience with deep expertise in search infrastructure like Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
About the job
What you will do
- Define and lead the technical vision for Rippling search systems: indexing pipelines, query serving, ranking/relevance, and retrieval quality measurement.
- Tackle open-ended challenges in hybrid retrieval, semantic/vector search, and metadata ranking.
- Build and operate resilient, high-performance infrastructure (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch) capable of supporting 10x scale growth while maintaining rigorous standards for latency, freshness, correctness and cost-efficiency.
- Define relevance strategy and evaluation: offline benchmarks, quality metrics, and production monitoring.
- Build reusable search platform abstractions used by multiple Rippling products.
- Elevate the entire engineering organization through strategic design reviews, mentorship, and the establishment of "best-in-class" operational standards.
What you will need
- 8+ years in backend/platform engineering with ownership of distributed systems in production.
- Deep experience in search infrastructure (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch/Solr/Lucene-style systems), indexing, and relevance tuning.
- Strong systems design fundamentals: storage/index design, query execution, performance optimization, and reliability engineering.
- Experience with data platforms and schema-rich systems, including large-scale ingestion and serving paths.
- Proficiency in at least one backend language (Python, Go, or Java).
- Strong cross-functional execution and ability to lead ambiguous multi-team platform initiatives.
Nice to have
- Hybrid retrieval, semantic/vector search, or ML-assisted ranking experience.
- Experience with analytics/query ecosystems (e.g., Trino/Presto, Kafka, Iceberg, Spark).
- Experience building discoverability products such as catalog search, field selection, metadata ranking.
Skills
Opensearch, Elasticsearch, Lucene, Python, Go, Java, Hybrid Retrieval, Semantic Search, Vector Search, Distributed Systems, Kafka, Spark
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