# Senior Software Engineer, Search & Discovery

**Company:** [Office Hours](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/office-hours)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, New York, NY
**Role:** Fullstack Engineering
**Salary:** $170k – $220k/yr
**Experience:** 6+ years
**Skills:** Node.js, TypeScript, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, RabbitMQ, openapi, React, Next.js
**Posted:** 2026-07-24

> Senior engineer to own end-to-end search, discovery, and recommendations for an expert matching platform, including data indexing, relevance/ranking, knowledge graphs, and LLM-assisted features. Requires 6+ years software engineering experience with strong backend skills and search/recommendation background.

## Job Description

## What you'll do
- Own search, discovery, and recommendations end to end, from the underlying data and indices to relevance, ranking, and the user-facing experience
- Build and improve the backend services and APIs that power matching across our knowledge graph, with a focus on precision, recall, and performance
- Turn fragmented, unstructured data into structured, searchable knowledge through reliable ingestion and indexing pipelines
- Ship user-facing search and discovery features across the stack, partnering closely with product and design
- Raise the bar on architecture, code quality, and observability as you scale this part of the platform
- Explore AI and LLM-assisted approaches to discovery (retrieval, embeddings, ranking, agentic workflows) and bring the promising ones to production

## What you bring
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, with strong backend fundamentals and comfort working across the stack
- Pride in your craft and a track record of shipping high-quality products and features at scale
- Experience with search, discovery, recommendations, or data-intensive systems, and enough knowledge of relevance and ranking to make an immediate impact
- The ability to turn ambiguous user and business problems into clean, scalable, well-tested engineering solutions
- A self-starter mindset, with the desire to own a domain end to end and grow into deeper ownership of it over time

## Tech Stack
**Back end:** Node.js, TypeScript, MongoDB, OpenAPI, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch
**Infrastructure:** AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Kibana, Sentry
**Workflow:** GitHub, Slack, Notion, Figma, Amplitude, Storybook
**Front end (not required for this role):** React, Next.js, Tailwind

## Bonus Experience
- Deep experience with search relevance and ranking, including precision/recall tradeoffs, retrieval, and reranking
- Experience building recommendation systems or personalization at scale
- Familiarity with vector or semantic search (embeddings, HNSW/IVF, hybrid retrieval)
- Experience with knowledge graphs or entity resolution
- You've integrated LLMs into search or discovery workflows in production
- Experience with data-intensive, event-driven, or asynchronous processing systems

## Benefits + Perks
- Competitive salary and equity
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- 401(k)
- Monthly wellness and fitness stipend
- Paid time off policy, along with company holidays
- Annual company off-sites (Tahoe, Mendocino, Mexico City, San Diego, Park City)
- Parent-friendly policies, remote flexibility, and paid family leave

## Similar roles

- [Senior Software Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/385dacb2-580f-4107-bb52-340f037ce168) - Snowflake - Virginia - $170k – $245k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/c231a86b-a83f-4e30-b054-acd1c2181511) - Circleback - San Francisco, CA - $170k – $250k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer, Trust & Safety](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/1e0a6e3c-c3aa-4da5-93d3-e10c906ed108) - Givebutter - Remote - $170k – $190k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer, Identity Platform](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/9340a9ef-efed-4357-95eb-a2e6481f0239) - Prove AI - Remote - $170k – $210k/yr
- [Senior Software Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/029cbb22-7214-4484-9748-ceafc8deee09) - Neon - New York, NY - $170k – $190k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/90b7d605-a6c7-44f7-8b28-335a2afd1fb0
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/90b7d605-a6c7-44f7-8b28-335a2afd1fb0