Senior Staff Software Engineer

• We're taking autonomous search mainstream, making product discovery more intuitive and conversational for customers, and more profitable for businesses.
• We’re making conversational shopping a reality, connecting every shopper with tailored guidance and product expertise — available on demand, at every touchpoint in their journey.
• We're designing the future of autonomous marketing, taking the work out of workflows, and reclaiming the creative, strategic, and customer-first work marketers were always meant to do.

About the Team: AI Search

The AI Search team owns Bloomreach’s core search platform, serving hundreds of millions of queries per day across enterprise customers. We build and operate highly scalable, low-latency systems that combine traditional information retrieval with modern ML-driven ranking and semantic understanding — all in production at scale.

This team sits at the intersection of systems engineering, search relevance, and applied ML, with direct impact on customer revenue and experience.

The Role:

As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will be a technical leader responsible for shaping the architecture and long-term evolution of Bloomreach’s Search platform. You will lead complex initiatives, set technical direction, and mentor engineers, while remaining deeply hands-on.

This role is ideal for someone with deep Search domain expertise, strong system design skills, and a track record of delivering and operating critical platforms at scale.

What You’ll Do

• Own and evolve core Search architecture, spanning indexing, retrieval, ranking, and query-time execution.
  
  
• Lead design and execution of large, cross-cutting search initiatives across multiple teams and services.
  
  
• Drive technical strategy for search relevance and ranking systems, balancing precision, recall, latency, and cost.
  
  
• Partner with Applied Science and ML teams to productionize ranking models and semantic retrieval techniques.
  
  
• Ensure search systems meet strict latency, availability, and scalability SLAs under real-world traffic.
  
  
• Act as a technical mentor and multiplier, raising the bar through design reviews, code reviews, and technical coaching.
  
  
• Influence roadmap and prioritization by articulating clear technical tradeoffs and long-term platform implications.
  
  
• Serve as a technical escalation point for complex production and architecture decisions.
  
  

Must-Have Qualifications

• 8–12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in backend and distributed systems.
  
  
• Strong, hands-on experience building large-scale Search or Information Retrieval systems.
  
  
• Deep expertise in search relevance, ranking, and query/catalog understanding.
  
  
• Proven experience designing and operating distributed, low-latency systems at scale.
  
  
• Strong coding skills in Java and/or Python, with a focus on production-quality, maintainable systems.
  
  
• Experience working in cloud environments (AWS or GCP) and modern deployment platforms.
  
  
• Ability to lead technical initiatives across teams and influence without direct authority.
  
  
• Clear, effective communicator able to explain complex technical concepts and tradeoffs.
  
  

Nice-to-Have

• Hands-on experience with Apache Solr, Lucene, or Elasticsearch.
  
  
• Experience with vector search, embeddings, or semantic retrieval.
  
  
• Familiarity with search evaluation, offline metrics, and A/B experimentation.
  
  
• Experience with big data or streaming systems (Spark, Kafka, Hadoop).
  
  
• Prior experience building enterprise-scale, customer-facing platforms.
  
  

What It’s Like to Work at Bloomreach

• A strong engineering culture that values ownership, technical excellence, and long-term thinking.
  
  
• The opportunity to lead mission-critical search systems with direct business impact.
  
  
• Collaboration with experienced engineers, scientists, and product leaders across regions.
  
  
• A role with real technical influence, not just delivery responsibility.

More things you'll like about Bloomreach:

Culture:

• A great deal of freedom and trust. At Bloomreach we don’t clock in and out, and we have neither corporate rules nor long approval processes. This freedom goes hand in hand with responsibility. We are interested in results from day one. 
• We have defined our 5 values and the 10 underlying key behaviors that we strongly believe in. We can only succeed if everyone lives these behaviors day to day. We've embedded them in our processes like recruitment, onboarding, feedback, personal development, performance review and internal communication. 
• We believe in flexible working hours to accommodate your working style.
• We work virtual-first with several Bloomreach Hubs available across three continents.
• We organize company events to experience the global spirit of the company and get excited about what's ahead.
• We encourage and support our employees to engage in volunteering activities - every Bloomreacher can take 5 paid days off to volunteer*.
• The Bloomreach Glassdoor page elaborates on our stellar 4.4/5 rating. The Bloomreach Comparably page Culture score is even higher at 4.9/5

Personal Development:

• We have a People Development Program -- participating in personal development workshops on various topics run by experts from inside the company. We are continuously developing & updating competency maps for select functions.
• Our resident communication coach Ivo Večeřa is available to help navigate work-related communications & decision-making challenges.*
• Our managers are strongly encouraged to participate in the Leader Development Program to develop in the areas we consider essential for any leader. The program includes regular comprehensive feedback, consultations with a coach and follow-up check-ins.
• Bloomreachers utilize the $1,500 professional education budget on an annual basis to purchase education products (books, courses, certifications, etc.)*

Well-being:

• The Employee Assistance Program -- with counselors -- is available for non-work-related challenges.*
• Subscription to Calm - sleep and meditation app.*
• We organize ‘DisConnect’ days where Bloomreachers globally enjoy one additional day off each quarter, allowing us to unwind together and focus on activities away from the screen with our loved ones.
• We facilitate sports, yoga, and meditation opportunities for each other.
• Extended parental leave up to 26 calendar weeks for Primary Caregivers.*

Compensation:

• Restricted Stock Units or Stock Options are granted depending on a team member’s role, seniority, and location.*
• Everyone gets to participate in the company's success through the company performance bonus.*
• We offer an employee referral bonus of up to $3,000 paid out immediately after the new hire starts.
• We reward & celebrate work anniversaries -- Bloomversaries!*

(*Subject to employment type. Interns are exempt from marked benefits, usually for the first 6 months.)

Excited? Join us and transform the future of commerce experiences!

If this position doesn't suit you, but you know someone who might be a great fit, share it - we will be very grateful!

Any unsolicited resumes/candidate profiles submitted through our website or to personal email accounts of employees of Bloomreach are considered property of Bloomreach and are not subject to payment of agency fees.

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