Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure - Slack

Salesforce•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Slack is looking for experienced engineers to join its Core Infrastructure organization to help design, develop, and maintain the information retrieval infrastructure that supports Slack Search and many other product experiences. This stack is at the heart of what makes Slack such a compelling store of company knowledge, allowing our customers to find and discover messages channels, people, files, and other business units within their workspaces. It is also of central importance to our efforts around generative AI, helping build products that are advised by the full wealth of knowledge in your company. We are seeking candidates who can continue to evolve our systems to be reliable, performant, scalable, and secure while helping push us to the cutting edge of search technology, incorporating the latest and greatest developments in the realm of information retrieval. We build our infrastructure using reliable tools that our team knows and trusts, including Java, Go, PHP/Hack, Python, MySQL, Solr, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, and Linux. Expertise in these areas is a huge plus, but experience building and maintaining robust distributed systems for search, using other common languages and cloud technologies is a fine substitute. We’re a collaborative team who genuinely enjoys working together. You’ll be working closely with other infrastructure engineers and machine learning engineers to develop our infrastructure, and collaborating closely with product engineers and managers to make our infrastructure support the needs of our users. Slack has a positive, diverse, and supportive culture—we look for people who are curious, inventive, and work to be a little better every single day. In our work together we aim to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, collaborative.

Requirements

You’ve been building web applications and operated large scale distributed systems professionally for 3+ years.
Have worked with Solr, ElasticSearch, Lucene, or other search technology.
Have had exposure to infrastructure/ops tools and frameworks such as Terraform, Chef, and Kubernetes
You hare proficient with functional or imperative programming languages — e.g., PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, C, or Java.
Track record of developing high-availability, performant, and scalable systems accessing large volumes of data over multiple clusters across different geographical regions
Have experience planning, implementing, and deploying software migrations and upgrades in a production environment
You can contribute to technical architecture discussions and help drive technical decisions within your team.
You write understandable, testable code with an eye towards maintainability.
You are a strong communicator. Explaining complex technical concepts to designers, support, and other engineers is no problem for you.
You possess computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, programming languages, distributed systems, and information retrieval.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience required.

Nice To Haves

You’ve built large-scale data pipelines professionally and can craft clean and beautiful code in Java, Scala, and/or SQL, and you possess exposure to Hadoop/Spark as well.
Experience around text mining and parsing

Responsibilities

Design and develop scalable and resilient information retrieval infrastructure to power Slack search and other products
Work with product engineering to conceptualize and build new features for our large (and growing!) user base.
Collaborate with team members to ensure high availability and reliability of a distributed search system.
You’ll produce high-quality results by contributing heavily to team projects that have a significant impact on the business.
You’ll actively own team features or systems and define their long-term health, while also improving the health of surrounding systems.
Deploy, configure, test, troubleshoot, maintain, upgrade Solr clusters and environments.
Plan resources and continuously optimize the infrastructure and configuration of our Solr clusters to maintain cluster health and search performance.
You'll assist our skilled support team and operations team in triaging and resolving production issues.
You'll mentor other engineers and deeply review code.
You’ll improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes.