Senior Search Engineer

Summary

Join Degreed's Search team as a Senior Search Engineer and design, implement, and optimize scalable, high-performance search systems. You will ensure accuracy, relevance, and low-latency performance, driving robust integrations across Degreed verticals. This role offers the opportunity to significantly impact the product and users by shaping the search experience and driving continuous innovation. You will own the technical roadmap for search systems, lead the design and architecture of new features, and mentor the engineering team. The ideal candidate possesses extensive experience with Elasticsearch, graph databases, and cloud platforms, along with a proven ability to build high-performing search systems. A strong background in ML model tuning or NLP is a plus.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience designing, building, and optimizing search systems — a core requirement for this role
• Founder mentality — demonstrating ownership, accountability, and a focus on delivering impact
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with Elasticsearch; 8+ years of overall engineering experience
• Proven ability to build search systems optimized for performance, contextual understanding, and sub-100ms latency at scale
• Experience working with graph databases, particularly for semantic search capabilities
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure), and experience designing scalable, cloud-native architectures
• Strong experience with database technologies like PostgreSQL or MongoDB to support search infrastructure

Responsibilities

• Own and define the technical roadmap for search systems, ensuring the platform evolves to meet future requirements while staying ahead of industry trends
• Lead the design and architecture of new search features and enhancements to existing functionality — including relevance tuning, indexing pipelines, and query optimization — ensuring scalability and performance
• Mentor and guide the engineering team on best practices in search development, infrastructure, and optimization techniques
• Own end-to-end implementation of new features and improvements to existing ones, including query optimization, relevance tuning, indexing pipelines, enhancements to word embedding models, and search boosting
• Analyze complex search logs and user behavior data to identify patterns, refine algorithms, and drive innovative improvements to the search experience
• Drive research and develop proof-of-concepts to explore advanced search capabilities — including semantic search, personalization, and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations and maintain a secure, compliant search infrastructure
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and Engineering Managers to align technical strategy with business goals

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience solving complex, scalable search problems for enterprise products with globally distributed customers (including in the EU)
• Hands-on, end-to-end experience across backend, ML, and DevOps in search implementations
• Start-up experience or a strong ability to thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments
• Contributions to open-source search projects or related technologies
• Experience in ML model tuning or NLP is a plus, especially for contextual and semantic search use cases

Benefits

• We take care of our people with a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your well-being, growth, and success
• Flexible work arrangements