Senior Staff Software Engineer

About the Team: AI Search

The AI Search team owns Bloomreach's core search platform, serving hundreds of millions of queries per day across enterprise customers. We build and operate highly scalable, low-latency systems that combine traditional information retrieval with modern ML-driven ranking and semantic understanding - all in production at scale.

This team sits at the intersection of systems engineering, search relevance, and applied ML, with direct impact on customer revenue and experience.

The Role:

As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will be a technical leader responsible for shaping the architecture and long-term evolution of Bloomreach's Search platform. You will lead complex initiatives, set technical direction, and mentor engineers, while remaining deeply hands-on.

This role is ideal for someone with deep Search domain expertise, strong system design skills, and a track record of delivering and operating critical platforms at scale.

What You'll Do

• Own and evolve core Search architecture, spanning indexing, retrieval, ranking, and query-time execution.
  
  
• Lead design and execution of large, cross-cutting search initiatives across multiple teams and services.
  
  
• Drive technical strategy for search relevance and ranking systems, balancing precision, recall, latency, and cost.
  
  
• Partner with Applied Science and ML teams to productionize ranking models and semantic retrieval techniques.
  
  
• Ensure search systems meet strict latency, availability, and scalability SLAs under real-world traffic.
  
  
• Act as a technical mentor and multiplier, raising the bar through design reviews, code reviews, and technical coaching.
  
  
• Influence roadmap and prioritization by articulating clear technical tradeoffs and long-term platform implications.
  
  
• Serve as a technical escalation point for complex production and architecture decisions.
  
  

Must-Have Qualifications

• 8-12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in backend and distributed systems.
  
  
• Strong, hands-on experience building large-scale Search or Information Retrieval systems.
  
  
• Deep expertise in search relevance, ranking, and query/catalog understanding.
  
  
• Proven experience designing and operating distributed, low-latency systems at scale.
  
  
• Strong coding skills in Java and/or Python, with a focus on production-quality, maintainable systems.
  
  
• Experience working in cloud environments (AWS or GCP) and modern deployment platforms.
  
  
• Ability to lead technical initiatives across teams and influence without direct authority.
  
  
• Clear, effective communicator able to explain complex technical concepts and tradeoffs.
  
  

Nice-to-Have

• Hands-on experience with Apache Solr, Lucene, or Elasticsearch.
  
  
• Experience with vector search, embeddings, or semantic retrieval.
  
  
• Familiarity with search evaluation, offline metrics, and A/B experimentation.
  
  
• Experience with big data or streaming systems (Spark, Kafka, Hadoop).
  
  
• Prior experience building enterprise-scale, customer-facing platforms.
  
  

What It's Like to Work at Bloomreach

• A strong engineering culture that values ownership, technical excellence, and long-term thinking.
  
  
• The opportunity to lead mission-critical search systems with direct business impact.
  
  
• Collaboration with experienced engineers, scientists, and product leaders across regions.
  
  
• A role with real technical influence, not just delivery responsibility.