Software Engineer III - Backend Search and Retrieval Systems

Indeed•Austin, TX

2d•$163,550 - $197,000•Remote

About The Position

This role involves writing software to fulfill larger, less well-defined full-stack work requests and backend recommendation and search features for the main site-search engine. The engineer will take on large, loosely defined priorities and broad technical challenges, independently researching, designing, and implementing solutions within a large-scale distributed architecture from scratch without requiring granular product management specifications. The position is responsible for owning, improving, and evaluating services in production by analyzing logs, traces, and metrics to understand performance and business value, and prioritizing, investigating, and implementing fixes for performance, reliability, and efficacy. Proactive analysis of logs, trace metrics, and resource utilization to resolve issues before they impact users or SLAs is expected. The role also includes performing deep systems analysis to act as an escalation point for complex distributed systems issues, untangling and fixing problems across both legacy and modern codebases, inside and outside of the services that the team owns. Serving as a technical bridge for cross-functional collaboration by digging into what partner teams are building, conducting design and code reviews, and ensuring interacting architectures align with operational standards and SLAs is also a key responsibility. Evaluating high-level architectural decisions that balance engineering time against infrastructure costs is required. Leading process improvements, writing comprehensive system documentation, and mentoring peer and junior engineers by providing constructive feedback on code, design, and execution are also part of the role. Independently identifying and designing new systems and enhancements to existing systems to support substantial new features and products, as well as improving quality, scalability, and performance, is expected. The engineer will work with business partners to clarify requirements, decompose large requests into smaller ones, and refine and clarify Product and Engineering goals to ensure they align with company objectives and are sufficiently defined for junior developers. Sharing expertise on products and technologies by mentoring other engineers and helping them prioritize work items based on urgency, business impact, and goals is also a responsibility.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or foreign equivalent degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a closely related computer technical field.
Five (5) years of experience in a software developer-related occupation.
Three (3) years of experience in: analyzing software and customer requirements, and preparing a development plans, including estimation, risks, analysis, unit tests, functional tests,and code design; investigating issues related to products/computer software applications, analyzing code, deployments, and logs for origins of bugs, and recommending solutions; implementing software engineering practices and best practices for the full software development life cycle, including requirement gathering, coding standards, peer code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations; and analyzing third-party tools and software and providing recommendations based on analysis.
Two (2) years of experience in: investigating and characterizing the performance of a distributed web-app, and identifying opportunities to improve performance; designing and operating large-scale, globally distributed recommendation and search architectures handling high transactional throughput across extensive machine fleets, while balancing architectural requirements between search/retrieval and usage-based optimization algorithms and maintaining personalization in both; designing and building test harnesses for n-tier applications utilizing service APIs, mocked data/stubbed responses, stored request data, and stored results for regression and performance testing; implementing, engineering, executing, tracking, troubleshooting, and documenting configuration management projects; and performing build engineering and defining dependencies in quality assurance, pre-production, and production environments utilizing build tools.
Education and experience may be gained concurrently.

Responsibilities

Write software to fulfill larger, less well-defined full-stack work requests and backend recommendation and search features for the main site-search engine.
Take on large, loosely defined priorities and broad technical challenges, independently researching, designing, and implementing solutions within our large-scale distributed architecture from scratch without requiring granular product management specifications.
Own, improve, and evaluate services in production by analyzing logs, traces, and metrics to understand performance and business value, and prioritize, investigate, and implement fixes for performance, reliability, and efficacy.
Proactively analyze logs, trace metrics, manage resource utilization, and resolve issues before they impact users or SLAs.
Perform deep systems analysis to act as an escalation point for complex distributed systems issues, untangling and fixing problems across both legacy and modern codebases, inside and outside of the services that the team owns.
Serve as a technical bridge for cross-functional collaboration by digging into what partner teams are building, conducting design and code reviews, and ensuring interacting architectures align with our operational standards and SLAs.
Evaluate high-level architectural decisions that balance engineering time against infrastructure costs (e.g., deciding whether to optimize an algorithm or scale compute power to free up engineering resources).
Lead process improvements, write comprehensive system documentation, and mentor peer and junior engineers by providing constructive feedback on code, design, and execution.
Independently identify and design new systems and enhancements to existing systems to support substantial new features and products, as well as improve quality, scalability, and performance.
Work with business partners to clarify requirements, to decompose large requests into smaller ones that can be executed sequentially or in parallel, and to refine and clarify Product and Engineering goals and ensure that they align with company objectives and are sufficiently defined for junior developers to successfully work on.
Share your expertise on products and technologies by mentoring other engineers and by helping them prioritize work items based on urgency, business impact, and goals.