Staff Software Engineer - AI Search

We're seeking a skilled Staff Software Engineer with leadership ambition, to join our Graph team. This role requires significant experience designing, implementing, and maintaining SaaS with high traffic load. This role requires several years of experience building semantic search, agentic search, and multilingual search systems. You will own epics from initial requirements gathering (PRD) through to successful completion, collaborating with stakeholders to ensure solutions meet market needs. You will also focus on the request latency when implementing features, to make sure our customers’ applications have good performance.

As a Staff Software Engineer, You Will

• Lead development and optimization of semantic search using LLMs, with a strong focus on multilingual support and improving non-English language performance.
• Systematically track, document, and address language-specific differences and rules for search relevance and query understanding.
• Architect and implement agentic search capabilities, leveraging AI/LLM technologies to deliver context-aware, personalized, and conversational search experiences.
• Design and enhance translation layers from GraphQL to Opensearch queries, ensuring accuracy, efficiency, and scalability.
• Mentor and support engineers and customers in building effective, performant search queries and solutions.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to define and deliver advanced search features, including AI-driven ranking, intent detection, and query rewriting.

Business Impact: Optimizely Graph is the core content delivery and search service powering the SaaS version of our Content Management System (CMS). Our customers, who rely on Graph for their websites and mobile applications, demand high performance and advanced query capabilities to deliver exceptional user experiences. Graph's reliability and speed directly impact their business success.

High Visibility & Innovation: Our roadmap prioritizes innovative content delivery and search features, placing search and AI at the forefront of our service offering. This focus differentiates us from competitors and empowers our customers to build cutting-edge web and mobile applications. You'll be instrumental in developing these differentiating features.

Shape the Future of Digital Experiences: The team plays a critical role in shaping the future of our customers' digital presence. Your contributions will directly influence how they engage their audiences and achieve their business objectives through innovative search and content delivery experiences.

About You

• You have deep expertise in search technologies such as Opensearch (preferred), Elasticsearch, or Solr as well as modern AI/LLM frameworks (OpenAI, HuggingFace, etc.).
• You have proven experience building semantic search and agentic search systems in production environments.
• You have a strong background in natural language processing (NLP), multilingual search, and cross-lingual relevance tuning.
• You have hands-on experience with query translation, query optimization, and search analytics.
• You have demonstrated your ability to work directly with customers and stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver tailored solutions.
• You have excellent communication and technical leadership skills with the ability to mentor and influence across teams.
• You have a track record of driving innovation in search, AI, and LLM-powered products.
• Ideally, you also have experience with search evaluation, A/B testing, and relevancy measurement.

Education

• Bachelor’s Degree (Computer Science or engineering preferred) or equivalent work experience