Staff Software Engineer

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.