Senior Search Engineer

Are you looking

• To make meaningful changes at the fastest-growing tech company in Japan?
• For a fair, highly flexible, inclusive working environment where anyone, regardless of their background, can make an impact?
• To build the next bold idea in customer acquisition and revenue growth through conversational commerce technology
• For a place where things are not just fast - but they happen now? 

We Are Zeals - “Designing conversations. Driving conversions.”

Zeals is not another chatbot. Our automated chat solution and conversational technology change how consumers purchase or act online. Zeals converts customers who appear "unengaged" to become "valuable" through designed chat on Messaging Apps. Using AI-powered, human-designed conversation flows across chat platforms, Zeals enables brands to build personalized, automated conversations with their consumers and develop a deeper understanding of their preferences while creating a delightful, seamless shopping experience. Our last 3 years have been phenomenal. We have captured the heart of many businesses in Japan, with over 480 enterprises relying on our chat commerce offering to boost their mobile business.

The goal is simple: to “revolutionize hospitality on the Internet” by unlocking digital customer service experiences that were limited to physical stores previously. 

Just Getting Started…

With more than 480 enterprise companies worldwide already utilizing our product, we are perfectly poised to seize market share and fuel exponential growth in the US market, with an eye on global expansion. Investors have taken note of our potential, leading us to recently secure nearly $40 million in funding, backed by Salesforce Ventures.

 

As our Senior Search Engineer

As a Senior Search Engineer, you will be an integral part of our engineering team, focused on building and optimising search solutions that power our conversational commerce platform. You will design and implement search algorithms that improve the relevance, accuracy, and speed of our chat interactions, ensuring that users get the best possible experience. You will collaborate closely with product, data science, and engineering teams to build scalable, efficient search systems that handle massive volumes of data while delivering lightning-fast results. We’re looking for someone with at least 5 years of experience in search technology.

Your Typical Day With Us

• Designing, developing, and optimizing search algorithms and infrastructure using technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, or Lucene.
• Integrating AI-powered models and machine learning to improve search relevance, speed, and accuracy.
• Collaborating with data science teams to implement NLP techniques and machine learning for semantic search enhancements.
• Building and maintaining high-performance indexing, ranking, and query processing systems to ensure the quality and relevance of search results.
• Tuning relevance metrics based on real-world data and continuously monitoring performance across various datasets and use cases.
• Mentoring junior engineers, conducting code reviews, and participating in an on-call rotation with additional compensation.

 

What You’ll Need

• 5+ years of experience as a search engineer or in a directly related role, with a strong background in search algorithms, information retrieval, and ranking systems.
• Expertise in search technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, or Lucene—experience designing search systems is a must.
• Proficiency in Python and/or Java for backend systems development.
• Strong experience with machine learning models and natural language processing to enhance search capabilities.
• Proven ability to optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning for search systems.
• Experience working with AI and ML models, preferably with tools like TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across teams and communicate complex search concepts clearly.
• English proficiency is required. Conversational Japanese is a plus.

What Makes You Stand Out

• Japanese language proficiency at a business or native level, allowing you to liaise with our primarily Japan-based users.
• Knowledge of cultural differences and how they impact user behavior in search contexts.
• Experience working with chatbot search systems, AI-driven search, or in SaaS environments.

 

Don’t just take our word for it 

Zeals has received the LinkedIn Top Startups award twice in a row. We believe this is a testament to our growth and our ability to attract great talents–who could potentially be your colleague! 

 

• Backend Languages: Go, Python, Elixir
• Frontend Languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (TypeScript, React.js, Recoil, Zod, Tanstack, etc)
• Mobile Languages: None
• Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, GCP Pub/Sub, Kubernetes, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, BigQuery, Elasticsearch, Qdrant
• Configuration management tool: Terraform
• CI/CD: Github Actions, ArgoCD, CircleCI
• Monitoring: Grafana, GCP Cloud Monitoring, GCP Logging, GCP Cloud Trace, Opsgenie
• Data: BigQuery, Parquet, Spark, Scala, Python, dbt
• Knowledge Tools: Confluence
• Other: GitHub / Slack / Jira
• Process: Scrum

Ready to roll up our sleeves

We obsess over bringing hospitality to everyone–be it our customers or you! You’re an individual with unique needs. So, While we can’t attract you with ping-pong tables or all-you-can-drink espresso bars, we promise you a once-in-a-lifetime experience and co-workers that you can brag about to your friends, family, or anyone you meet the next time you go out for a party! . As an employer we are ready to roll-up our sleeves and change the status quo if it means to make your experience better!

• Salary Range : competitive (performance review every 6 months)
• Performance review: twice a year
• Holidays: 10 days paid holidays during the first year, weekends off, national holidays, summer and winter break. 
• Visa support: We sponsor visas for the right candidates. You can expect full visa support from our professional HR team. 
• Education support: Udemy, Frontend Masters
• Flexible working: Highly flexible, remote-first international organization 
• For Japanese residence: Work from anywhere, interim work from overseas, full flex time
• Housing allowance (within 1.5KM away from office)

Club activity allowance

• Shuffle Lunch allowance (Cross department lunch) 
• Zeals Bar (bi-monthly free flow beer party