Rippling
Staff Software Engineer - Search Platform
$189K–$315K
Seattle, WA +1 · On-site · Staff · Full-time · Posted Jul 8, 2026
- Location
- Seattle, WA
San Francisco, CA - Experience
- 8+ years in backend/platform engineering, owning distributed systems in production.
About the job
Leads the technical vision, architecture, and operation of shared search infrastructure and primitives across Rippling products.
What you'll do
- Own indexing, retrieval, ranking, query performance, and relevance evaluation for search systems.
- Build resilient, high-performance search infrastructure and reusable platform abstractions for multiple products.
- Lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and establish operational standards.
What they ask for
- Deep experience with search infrastructure, indexing, and relevance tuning.
- Strong systems design skills covering storage/index design, query execution, performance, and reliability.
- Experience with data platforms and large-scale ingestion and serving paths.
- Proficiency in at least one backend language: Python, Go, or Java; and cross-functional leadership of multi-team platform initiatives.
Nice to have
- Experience with hybrid retrieval, semantic/vector search, or ML-assisted ranking.
- Experience with analytics/query ecosystems such as Trino/Presto, Kafka, Iceberg, or Spark.
Pay
USD 189,000–315,000 per year (base salary)
Tools
OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Solr, Lucene, Python, Go, Java, Kafka
AI focus
Explore hybrid retrieval, semantic/vector search, and ML-assisted ranking; partner with AI/product teams on shared search primitives.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative