Job Title: Sr. Search Platform Engineer Location: Sunnyvale, CA (On-Site)
Job Description:
We are seeking a Senior Search Platform Engineer with strong, hands-on experience designing, operating, and optimizing large-scale distributed search systems. This role focuses on running search platforms at scale (hundreds of millions to billions of documents) and supporting a new initiative to modernize and migrate existing search infrastructure.
The ideal candidate has deep experience with Apache Solr, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or similar search technologies, along with a solid understanding of distributed systems internals, performance tuning, and high-availability architectures.
Key Responsibilities
Design, deploy, and operate large-scale distributed search clusters
Optimize indexing, querying, and shard strategies for performance and reliability
Diagnose and resolve search-related performance, scalability, and stability issues
Support the modernization or migration of search platforms (e.g., Solr to OpenSearch/Elasticsearch)
Partner with application and platform teams to improve search relevance, latency, and throughput
Contribute to search architecture decisions, capacity planning, and operational best practices
Required Qualifications
7+ years of experience as a backend, platform, or infrastructure engineer
Strong hands-on experience with distributed search platforms, such as:
o Apache Solr
o Elasticsearch / OpenSearch
o or comparable large-scale search technologies
Experience operating search systems at very large scale (hundreds of millions to billions of documents)
Experience with ingesting data to ElasticSearch or OpenSearch that needs expertise in the data migration and data pipeline development space
Solid understanding of distributed systems concepts, including:
o Sharding and replication
o Cluster coordination and failover
o Index lifecycle management
Proven experience with performance tuning and optimization for search workloads
Strong troubleshooting and debugging skills in production environments
Nice to Have
Experience migrating or modernizing search platforms (e.g., Solr OpenSearch/Elasticsearch)
Experience with cloud-based deployments (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure)
Knowledge of data ingestion pipelines and reindexing strategies
Familiarity with observability tools for monitoring and performance analysis
Experience working with high-availability, fault-tolerant systems
What We re Looking For
Engineers who have owned and operated search platforms, not just consumed them
Comfort working with large datasets and complex distributed systems
Ability to reason about tradeoffs between performance, scalability, and reliability
Strong collaboration skills and architectural mindset
Never miss an opportunity! Create an alert based on the job you applied for.
