Sr Software Engineer (API, Search Engine, Java)

About this role:

Our mission is to create effortless, customer-centric, habit-forming digital experiences that enable clients to solve their mission critical priorities. We are seeking an experienced Sr. Search Engineer to help build and enhance a scalable, high-performance search platform. As data volumes grow and user queries become more complex, we need someone with deep expertise in search technologies like OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Apache Solr, or Lucene to push our infrastructure to the next level.

In this role, you'll focus on implementing advanced search capabilities, including vector search, natural language processing (NLP), and personalization, all aimed at improving search relevancy and user experience. You'll collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including data engineering, data science and cloud, to design robust search platform, data pipelines and integrate machine learning models that continuously refine search results. Strong knowledge of distributed systems, API development, and performance optimization will be key to succeeding in this role.

What you'll do:

Technical Collaboration & Leadership: Providing technical leadership in search technologies, guiding cross-functional projects with data science, engineering, and infrastructure teams.

Developing Search Algorithms: Implementing advanced search algorithms leveraging search engine features such as vector search, natural language processing, personalization, and other state-of-the-art technologies.

Relevancy Model Development: Collaborating with machine learning and data science teams to optimize relevancy models that improve user search experiences, incorporating feedback loops and behavioral data.

Developing APIs: Writing APIs or services to integrate relevancy feature embeddings into the search engine, and developing efficient, real-time search query logic to capitalize on these embeddings.

A/B Testing and Experimentation: Implementing frameworks for A/B testing to experiment with different search and relevancy approaches, measuring and analyzing the outcomes to drive continuous improvements.

Infrastructure Optimization: Enhancing the search infrastructure to ensure scalability and robustness as the system grows in complexity and usage.

Performance Tuning: Continuously testing and optimizing the performance of the search engine to improve query response times, accuracy, and relevancy based on defined metrics.

Integration: Integrating the search infrastructure with other services and data platforms to enable seamless data retrieval, indexing, and search performance monitoring.

Data Pipeline Management: Developing and maintaining scalable data pipelines to ensure efficient data flow, low-latency indexing, and real-time search capabilities.

Data Analysis: Analyzing search patterns, user interactions, and relevancy metrics to refine search algorithms and improve the overall user experience.

Search Result Tuning Based on Business Metrics: Collaborating with product and business teams to fine-tune search results to align with business goals like conversion, engagement, and retention.

Contribute to the review and analysis of business requirements.

Perform and participate in code reviews, peer inspections and technical design/specifications.

Ensure code integrity standards and code best practice.

Must have:

5-8 years of post-college experience in Software engineering, API development or related fields. The candidate should have strong qualitative and quantitative problem-solving skills along with high on ownership and accountability.

Experience with search engines such as OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Solr, or similar technologies, and proficiency in leveraging advanced techniques like vector search, NLP, and personalization to build sophisticated, multifaceted relevancy scoring systems.

Strong understanding of concurrency patterns, experience building thread safe code, building highly performant code.

Experience leading teams in building search applications from the scratch, migrating applications to different search engines.

Proficiency in writing high quality production code, demonstrating strong software engineering expertise

In-depth knowledge of relevancy metrics, including precision, recall, and DCG, and the ability to apply these metrics to improve search performance.

Strong expertise in programming languages such as Java, Python used for search and data engineering solutions.

Experience designing large-scale distributed systems, particularly custom search functionalities, and working with cloud technologies like AWS (e.g., EC2, S3, Lambdas, Kinesis).

Experience with search analytics and monitoring tools like Dynatrace, and Datadog, used for tracking and improving search performance.

Experience working in an Agile environment, contributing to continuous integration and delivery pipelines, and strong experience with microservices architecture.

Experience working with data engineers and data science teams to build feedback loops for machine learning models that enhance search relevancy.

Experience with A/B testing and experimentation to validate search algorithm changes and drive continuous improvements based on real-world results.

Experience working with Postgres, or Oracle or equivalent enterprise RDBMS system.

Nice to have:

Experience with terraform and DevOps pipelines.

Who you are:

Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent degree in Computer Science or a related field required

Excellent communication and prioritization skills.

Able to work independently or within a team proactively in a fast-paced AGILE-SCRUM environment.

Owns success - Takes responsibility for successful delivery of the solutions.

Strong desire to improve upon their skills in software development, frameworks, and technologies.

Who are we?

At Gartner, Inc. (NYSE:IT), we guide the leaders who shape the world.

Our mission relies on expert analysis and bold ideas to deliver actionable, objective business and technology insights, helping enterprise leaders and their teams succeed with their mission-critical priorities.

Since our founding in 1979, we've grown to 21,000 associates globally who support ~14,000 client enterprises in ~90 countries and territories. We do important, interesting and substantive work that matters. That's why we hire associates with the intellectual curiosity, energy and drive to want to make a difference. The bar is unapologetically high. So is the impact you can have here.

What makes Gartner a great place to work?

Our vast, virtually untapped market potential offers limitless opportunities - opportunities that may not even exist right now - for you to grow professionally and flourish personally. How far you go is driven by your passion and performance.

We hire remarkable people who collaborate and win as a team. Together, our singular, unifying goal is to deliver results for our clients.

Our teams are inclusive and composed of individuals from different geographies, cultures, religions, ethnicities, races, genders, sexual orientations, abilities and generations.

We invest in great leaders who bring out the best in you and the company, enabling us to multiply our impact and results. This is why, year after year, we are recognized worldwide as a great place to work.

What do we offer?

Gartner offers world-class benefits, highly competitive compensation and disproportionate rewards for top performers.

In our hybrid work environment, we provide the flexibility and support for you to thrive - working virtually when it's productive to do so and getting together with colleagues in a vibrant community that is purposeful, engaging and inspiring.

Ready to grow your career with Gartner? Join us.

Gartner believes in fair and equitable pay. A reasonable estimate of the base salary range for this role is 100,000 USD - 154,000 USD. Please note that actual salaries may vary within the range, or be above or below the range, based on factors including, but not limited to, education, training, experience, professional achievement, business need, and location. In addition to base salary, employees will participate in either an annual bonus plan based on company and individual performance, or a role-based, uncapped sales incentive plan. Our talent acquisition team will provide the specific opportunity on our bonus or incentive programs to eligible candidates. We also offer market leading benefit programs including generous PTO, a 401k match up to $7,200 per year, the opportunity to purchase company stock at a discount, and more.

The policy of Gartner is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, citizenship status, age, national origin, ancestry, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status and to seek to advance the principles of equal employment opportunity.

Gartner is committed to being an Equal Opportunity Employer and offers opportunities to all job seekers, including job seekers with disabilities. If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran, you may request a reasonable accommodation if you are unable or limited in your ability to use or access the Company's career webpage as a result of your disability. You may request reasonable accommodations by calling Human Resources at +1 or by sending an email to

Job Requisition ID:106846

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