Lead Software Engineer – Search Platform

Kroger-posted about 11 hours ago
Full-time • Mid Level
Blue Ash, OH
5,001-10,000 employees
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We’re seeking a hands-on Search Platform Engineering Lead to serve as the technical lead for Kroger’s Search Core team. In this role, you will guide implementation decisions and software delivery for our search platform—designing and evolving data pipelines and core services in Java and Python that power high‑scale, low‑latency search experiences across Kroger’s digital channels. You’ll partner closely with Search Architect, product management, data engineering, and possible ML teams to deliver resilient, observable services; set engineering standards; and mentor developers while leading the team through design reviews, implementation, and production support. The role will ensure our search platform is performant, reliable, and easy to extend. Accountable for proactively leading or supporting software engineering activities that create deliverables that guide the direction, development, and delivery of software solutions that meet business needs. Provide leadership, facilitation, analysis, and design tasks required to deliver critical business solutions. Develop target-state guidance (i.e., reusable standards, design patterns, guidelines, individual parts, and configurations) to evolve the organization's development process. Demonstrate the company's core values of respect, honesty, integrity, diversity, inclusion and, safety.

  • Develop a high-quality codebase, lead design discussions, execute development against design, and navigate complex codebase
  • Lead the development implementation of technology strategy within a defined set of teams. Executes against defined technology roadmap to support project portfolio and business strategy
  • Oversee the implementation of enterprise standards across domains: operations, infrastructure, data, applications, development, security & risk, and business continuance
  • Provide technical leadership to ensure clarity between ongoing projects and the strategic objectives of the company
  • Drive digital innovation by leveraging innovative new technologies and approaches to renovate, extend, and, transform the existing core technology base and IT estate
  • Implement high-level migration plans to address the gaps between the current and future state, typically in sync with the budgeting or other capital planning processes
  • Present opportunities with cost/benefit analysis to leadership to shape sound architectural decisions
  • Lead the analysis of the technology environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement
  • Mentor team members in software development principles, patterns, processes and, practices
  • Promote the capture and reuse of intellectual capital, including code objects and components
  • Draft and review architectural diagrams, interface specifications, class structures and, other design documents
  • Must be able to perform the essential job functions of this position with or without reasonable accommodation
  • Bachelor's Degree Computer Science or in a STEM major
  • 5+ years of successful and applicable experience taking a lead role in building complex software and automation systems that has been successfully delivered to customers
  • 5+ years of a proven track record of designing and delivering large scale, high-quality systems
  • 5+ years of successful and applicable hands-on experience in software or infrastructure development domain and principles, including design patterns and code structure
  • Strong knowledge of industry trends and industry competition
  • Deep knowledge in a minimum of two of the following technical disciplines: infrastructure and network design, application development, application programming interfaces (APIs), cloud, middleware, servers and storage, database management, and operations
  • Understanding of network and security architecture
  • Demonstrated written, oral and, presentation/public speaking communication skills
  • Proven ability to think and contribute at the strategic level
  • Demonstrated capability to build, mentor and maintain an inclusive team-based environment
  • Experience building solutions using elastic architectures (preferably Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform)
  • Programming Languages: Strong proficiency in Java and Python for building scalable backend services and data pipelines.
  • Distributed Systems & Microservices: Experience designing and operating high-availability, low-latency services in a microservices architecture.
  • Search Technologies & Semantic Search: Familiarity with search engines (e.g., Elasticsearch, Solr) and vector search frameworks (FAISS, Vertex AI Vector Search). Understanding of semantic embeddings, retrieval models, and ranking algorithms. (nice to have but not required)
  • Data Engineering: Expertise in data pipelines, streaming frameworks (Databricks, Kafka, Pub/Sub), and batch processing. Strong knowledge of BigQuery, Bigtable, and feature stores for ML-driven search.
  • Cloud & Platform Engineering: Hands-on experience with GCP services (Vertex AI, Cloud Run, GCS, IAM). CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
  • Observability & Reliability: Building monitoring, alerting, and logging for mission-critical services. Familiarity with SLOs, SLIs, and incident response practices.
  • Performance Optimization: Profiling and tuning for sub-second latency under high traffic.
  • Security & Compliance: Implementing secure coding practices and aligning with privacy and governance standards.
  • Unit testing Proficiency writing isolated unit tests in Java (JUnit/AssertJ/Mockito) and Python (pytest). Coverage targets and TDD expectations consistent with Kroger draft standards (≥ 85% coverage; unit suite runs in pipeline before merge)
  • Experience & Leadership Technical Leadership: Proven track record as a tech lead or principal engineer, guiding architecture decisions and mentoring engineers.
  • Search & eCommerce Domain Knowledge: Understanding of product discovery, relevance tuning, and customer intent modeling.
  • ML Integration: Experience operationalizing ML models (embedding generation, ranking) in production environments.
  • Cross-functional Collaboration: Ability to work with product managers, data scientists, and platform teams to deliver end-to-end solutions.
  • Scalability & Resilience: Designing systems that handle peak eCommerce traffic and ensure high uptime.
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