Staff Search Engineer

Vacancy Name
Staff Search Engineer

Vacancy No
VN373

Status
Active

Location
Remote US

Location Country
United States

Location Region

Location City

Description
Who are we?
Auction Technology Group (ATG) is transforming the multi-billion-dollar global auction industry. Our platforms connect thousands of auction houses with buyers in over 170 countries, powering more than $15 billion in annual sales. Through innovative online auction technologies, we help auctioneers expand their reach, boost efficiency, and maximize value-while giving bidders unrivaled access to rare and specialized items. As a publicly traded company, ATG has scaled from $18 million to $170 million in revenue, with sustained growth beyond the pandemic. We're modernizing one of the last industries to fully go digital-building a global, category-defining business in the process.

What are we hiring for?
We are making a significant investment in creating a user experience that meets the expectations of our customers. Search is central to that vision, from an inspirational and discovery perspective. The Search Engineer will collaborate with Product Managers and Machine Learning Engineers, supported by the broader organization, to modernize and optimize the search experience. This includes leveraging modern AI and information retrieval techniques-including NLP, Computer Vision, Vector Search, Hybrid Retrieval, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and FastAPI to build scalable multi-stage retrieval and ranking systems

Who are we looking for?
You have a passion for building solutions but are always looking for how we can iterate and improve by using the latest technologies. Not only do you put the customer at the heart of everything you do, but you are adept at enabling data driven decisions to design and deliver strategic projects. You will be comfortable working cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, DevOps and data teams to develop our products and improve the end user experience. You should have a strong track record of successful prioritization, meeting critical deadlines, and enthusiastically tackling challenges with an eye toward problem solving.

Key Responsibilities
What will you do?

- Design and improve retrieval relevance systems including BM25 tuning, query understanding, query expansion, semantic retrieval, ANN/vector search, sparse and hybrid retrieval, entity recognition, and embedding-based ranking pipelines.

- Build learning-to-rank, personalization, recommendation, and query reranking systems using behavioral signals, engagement metrics, and marketplace interaction data.

- Design and develop scalable APIs and retrieval services to integrate custom ML models for reranking, personalization, recommendations, and visual discovery experiences.

-Optimization of indexes, and experimentation with analyzers

-Performing offline analysis and running production A/B experiments to determine the effectiveness of changes to the search experience

Key Requirements
What do you need?

- Strong software engineering skills with experience building production systems using Python and distributed data/search platforms.

- 5+ years of experience designing, tuning, and operating Elasticsearch or OpenSearch-based search platforms.

- Experience with search relevance metrics and experimentation frameworks such as CTR, conversion, NDCG, recall, precision, or engagement-based evaluation

- Experience with observability and search infrastructure tooling such as Kibana, Logstash, Datadog, Grafana, or related monitoring platforms

- Experience building scalable distributed systems with attention to latency, throughput, relevance quality, and operational reliability.

-Familiarity with database architecture and design

- Ability to effectively leverage AI-assisted development tools while maintaining strong engineering quality, observability, testing, and operational standards

-A deep interest in understanding user behavior and improving user experience

- Experience operating production systems, including incident troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, observability, metrics instrumentation, alerting, and reliability improvements.

-A strong test-and-learn mindset

-Ability to mentor and coach team members to drive excellence

-Excellent problem-solving, cooperation, and strategic thinking skills

Nice-to-Have:

-Experience collaborating with Machine Learning Engineers or Data Scientists

-Familiarity with message-queue-based pipelines

-Experience with porting features between search platforms

Auction Technology Group is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.

The pay range for this role is $180,000 to $195,000. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location. This may be different in other locations due to differences in the cost of labor.

The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans.

Employment Type
Permanent

Duration
Permanent

Business Name
Proxibid

Function Name
Technology