Staff Software Engineer, Search Control Plane
About The Position
The AI Enabled Software Engineering team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build the foundation of Thomson Reuters’ next-generation search platform. The platform consolidates search systems across products and services into a fully managed, customizable, sovereign, self-service platform for millions of end users, internal agents, and search teams. The role designs, builds, deploys, and operates a scalable, reliable control plane that automates the full lifecycle of search systems, including provisioning Kubernetes, Kafka, ingestion pipelines, and the query and ingestion data plane. The platform must provide sovereignty, observability, security, and lifecycle workflows for schema changes, reingestion, index switching, and rollback. The position owns the infrastructure behind search indexes, including Vespa and OpenSearch, and establishes standards, reliability practices, and operational processes. Staff engineers define architectural direction, lead cross-team work, mentor engineers, and improve delivery through frequent production releases and AI-assisted development.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of software engineering experience, with progression to staff-level scope, including ownership of a functional area and leadership of cross-functional projects.
- A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Experience designing, building, and operating production platform or infrastructure services at scale, with strong distributed systems fundamentals.
- Proficiency in a language such as Go, Java, Python, or an equivalent.
- Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience, preferably AWS, including Kubernetes or another container orchestrator and infrastructure as code.
- Production experience operating a search engine such as Vespa, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch, including capacity planning and index lifecycle.
- Operational rigor, including SLO definition, observability, on-call leadership, and learning from incidents.
- Fluency with AI-assisted development tools.
Nice To Haves
- Experience designing APIs used by multiple teams, with versioning, access control, and a strong developer experience.
- Experience with multi-tenant platform security, including identity integration, role-based access control, encryption, and customer-managed keys.
- Experience operating Kafka or another distributed messaging platform in production.
- Experience building internal developer platforms where documentation and ease of adoption are treated as product concerns.
- Experience with tracing and observability for non-deterministic or agentic workflows.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and own the control plane for creating, configuring, upgrading, promoting, and retiring search systems.
- Automate provisioning of Kubernetes workloads, Kafka messaging, ingestion pipelines, and the query and ingestion data plane.
- Build lifecycle workflows for schema changes, reingestion, index switching, and rollback, including clear index readiness status.
- Implement tenant data isolation, enterprise identity, role-based access, and controls that keep customer data within required boundaries.
- Design scalable configuration data models and persistence for system definitions, component registries, index lifecycle state, and audit history.
- Set interface standards, including versioned and backward-compatible contracts, documentation, and support for evaluation and experimentation workflows.
- Own infrastructure for Vespa and OpenSearch indexes, including provisioning, capacity planning, health, backup and restore, and on-call operations.
- Set capacity budgets and limits for reindexing and backfills in partnership with the retrieval owner.
- Establish observability and own platform SLOs for availability, query latency, ingestion throughput, and document freshness, with tracing and alerting across provisioning, ingestion, and data-plane workflows.
- Own cloud infrastructure as code across environments and the CI/CD pipeline, and reduce delivery friction.
- Build security into the platform through least-privilege access, secrets management, encryption at rest and in transit, customer-managed keys, audit logging, and compliance.
- Plan for platform cost and performance as tenants, content, and query traffic grow.
- Operate the platform through on-call work, incident response, and post-mortems that produce systemic fixes.
- Set architectural principles and design patterns for the control plane and infrastructure, and serve as a technical authority for other teams.
- Lead cross-team projects, set priorities, and advise leadership on complex infrastructure and security decisions.
- Partner with client teams to understand platform adoption and incorporate their feedback into the roadmap.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers and help the team use AI-assisted development effectively.
Benefits
- Flexible hybrid work environment for office-based roles.
- Work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
- Flexible vacation and paid time off, including two company-wide mental health days.
- Access to the Headspace app and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
- Retirement savings plan and competitive 401(k) with company match.
- Tuition reimbursement.
- Employee incentive programs and access to an Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
- Paid volunteer days and opportunities for pro-bono consulting projects and ESG initiatives.
- Health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance.
- Parental leave and sabbatical leave.
- Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts.
- Fitness reimbursement and Employee Assistance Program.
- Commuter benefits.
- Adoption and surrogacy assistance.
- Optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance, and optional life and AD&D insurance.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
