Senior Software Engineer - Search

Senior Software Engineer - Search

As a Senior Software Engineer on our Search Services and Applications team, you'll design and build cloud-based search services and applications across traditional and AI-powered search (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, NLP, vector search, and LLM-enabled experiences). You'll be hands-on in delivering high-quality software while providing technical ownership within the team through strong design, code reviews, and pragmatic decision-making. You'll help shape and execute the technical direction for our search products by contributing to architectural decisions that balance innovation with scalability and reliability. This includes evaluating new capabilities (e.g., hybrid retrieval, embeddings, reranking, and query understanding), running proof-of-concepts, and participating in design reviews to ensure we build the right solutions for relevance, performance, and operability. Your days will be a blend of hands-on engineering writing code, utilizing agentic ai, improving tests, performance tuning, and troubleshooting production issues. You'll work closely with product and cross-functional partners to translate requirements into well-designed services and features, and you'll own components end-to-end with a DevOps mindset (instrumentation, monitoring, reliability, and cost awareness). This role is ideal if you enjoy solving complex relevance and distributed-systems problems, thrive in a collaborative environment, and want to have a direct impact on how we build and scale search technology.

Essential Functions

• Design, implement, and review code for search services and applications; apply sound design patterns and continuously improve quality.
• Partner with peers on design and implementation details and provide actionable feedback through code and design reviews.
• Participate in and contribute to Agile DevOps team activities. Effective in paired programming and working independently.
• Help drive clarity in planning. Contribute to task definition, prioritization, and assignment. Drive deliverables with a sense of urgency and ownership along with surfacing risks, mitigating them, and suggesting course corrections when appropriate.
• Own multiple products with a DevOps and service-ownership mindset. Deliver quality solutions with TDD, test automation, instrumentation, monitoring, secure/defensive coding, resiliency, and scalability.
• Select methods and procedures on new or special assignments collaboratively.
• Design, develop, review, and deliver application and service architecture for search (indexing, query, relevance, and retrieval pipelines).
• Implement and optimize OpenSearch/Elasticsearch indices, analyzers, mappings, and query DSL to improve relevance, latency, and cost.
• Build and operate vector search capabilities (embeddings generation, indexing, kNN search) and hybrid retrieval (keyword + vector), including evaluation and tuning.
• Contribute to LLM-enabled search experiences (e.g., RAG, reranking, query rewriting, and answer grounding) with a focus on safety, latency, and measurable relevance.
• Collaborate on work with the team and contributing teams.
• Engage in cross-functional teams and ensure successful project and/or product delivery.
• Contribute improvements to shared resources and engineering practices (internal libraries, tooling, documentation, and operational runbooks) that help the team deliver reliably.
• Make sound technical decisions, drive alignment through clear options/trade-offs, and unblock delivery within the search domain.
• Impact and influence across multiple teams and domains.

Minimum Requirements

Technical Expertise:

• Design and deliver robust, scalable backend services in Java and/or Python on AWS, including search-heavy workloads.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI capabilities into products (e.g., embeddings, LLMs, NLP, reranking) and operating them in production.
• Experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch: index design (mappings/analyzers), ingestion, query DSL, and performance/relevance tuning.
• Ability to design relevance experiments and evaluate quality using offline metrics (e.g., NDCG/precision/recall) and online signals (A/B tests, click/engagement data).
• Experience with vector search and/or RAG systems: embedding pipelines, hybrid retrieval, prompt design/guardrails, and observability for latency and quality.

Leadership & Strategy:

• Assess business value, trade-offs, risks, and technical constraints during discovery and planning
• Help drive the technical direction for AI-driven search and backend services within the team, aligning designs with product goals
• Lead or contribute to architectural reviews and clearly communicate recommendations and trade-offs
• Evaluate and recommend new technologies to add to the stack
• Stay current with industry trends and emerging technologies

Team Development:

• Mentor junior software engineers across one or more functional areas
• Help foster an inclusive environment where team members are motivated to succeed with autonomy, mastery, and purpose
• Share technical expertise and knowledge on relevant topics
• Contribute to the team's technical direction by proposing improvements, sharing learnings, and raising the bar on engineering practices

Communication & Collaboration:

• Work effectively with product leaders, executives, and cross-functional teams to align on goals and architecture
• Serve as a technical lead for a project(s) or component(s), coordinating with partners to deliver on time
• Provide complete, actionable, and timely technical feedback
• Articulate technical decisions with clear rationale in design meetings and discussions
• Adapt communication of complex technical topics to different audiences

Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Experience: 5+ years of software engineering experience Supervision: N/A Certifications: N/A Language Skills: Ability to read, analyze and interpret general business periodicals, professional journals, technical procedures or governmental regulations. Ability to write reports, business correspondence and procedure manuals. Ability to effectively present information and respond to questions from a variety of both internal and external sources. Physical Capabilities: Standard categories The physical capabilities described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit; use hands to finger, handle, or feel; reach with hands and arms; and talk or hear. The employee is occasionally required to stand and walk. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus.

RevSpring is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.