Staff Software Engineer, Search

dowjones; Barcelona; Hybrid; EUR 80,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare plans

Paid time off

Remote work options

Meal benefit

Retirement plans

Insurance plans

Well-being resources

Family care benefits

Subscription discounts

Employee referral program

Job summary

Dow Jones in Barcelona is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for our Search team to design and build search APIs and semantic systems that connect millions of users with relevant content in real time.

You will act as technical lead, shape architecture, mentor engineers, and partner with Product and Brand teams to improve the search experience. AI-assisted development is encouraged.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience designing and scaling search or information retrieval systems.
• Experience with RESTful APIs.
• Experience with CI/CD, multi-region deployments and disaster recovery.
• Bachelor's degree in CS or related field preferred.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate Search APIs and semantic search systems for real-time relevance.
• Lead semantic retrieval, embeddings, vector indexing and ranking pipelines.
• Act as technical lead for the Search team, shaping architecture and standards.
• Collaborate with Product Managers and Brand partners to meet search goals.
• Mentor engineers via code reviews, pairing, and guidance.
• Champion AI-assisted development tools to boost velocity and quality.
• Manage infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Chef; maintain Jenkins pipelines.
• Containerise services with Docker and Kubernetes for reliability and release
• Ensure reliability and observability with SLOs, dashboards, post-mortems.
• Drive process improvements and developer experience across the team.

Skills

Software engineering

Search systems design

RESTful APIs

CI/CD

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Terraform

Chef

Jenkins

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Job Description:

About the Team

Our Technology team drives the evolution of our Engineering, Data, Product and User Experience functions. With a keen focus on delivering cutting-edge solutions, we shape the digital landscape for our customers, readers and users. From revolutionizing visuals to optimizing tools and harnessing the power of data, mobile, video and social platforms, our team is committed to providing a seamless and immersive experience across all touchpoints. Collaborating closely with our newsrooms and strategic partners, we spearhead the development of groundbreaking products and technologies.

About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Search team in Barcelona. You will design and build the search APIs, semantic and lexical search systems that connect millions of users with the most relevant content across our digital products.

You will serve as a technical lead for the Search team, setting engineering direction, driving architectural decisions and mentoring engineers. You will partner closely with Product and Brand stakeholders to continuously improve the search experience for our users. The ideal candidate is comfortable embracing AI-assisted development — leveraging tools such as Claude Code and other coding agents to accelerate delivery and raise the quality bar across the team.

You Will

• Design, build, and operate Search APIs and semantic search systems that deliver highly relevant content to millions of users in real time.

• Lead the development of semantic retrieval and ranking pipelines, including embedding generation, vector indexing, and relevance tuning.

• Act as technical lead for the Search team — driving architecture decisions, authoring technical design documents, and setting engineering standards.

• Collaborate with Product Managers and Brand partners to understand search quality goals, translate them into engineering initiatives and measure their impact.

• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through code reviews, pair programming and technical guidance, fostering a culture of continuous learning.

• Champion the use of AI coding agents (Claude Code and similar tools) to accelerate development velocity and improve code quality across the team.

• Manage and evolve infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and Chef, and maintain CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins.

• Containerise and deploy services using Docker and Kubernetes, ensuring efficient resource utilisation, high availability and smooth releases.

• Own reliability and observability of Search services — define SLOs, build dashboards, and lead incident response and post-mortems.

• Demonstrate knowledge of industry trends, technologies and tools, and drive improvements to engineering processes and developer experience across the team.

You Have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.

• Experience designing and scaling search or information retrieval systems, including familiarity with semantic search, embeddings and vector databases.

• Experience implementing RESTful APIs following industry standards.

• Experience implementing, testing, deploying, troubleshooting and supporting multi-region, multi-environment systems with CI/CD, high availability and disaster recovery.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Chef) and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins).

• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes for containerised deployments in production environments.

• Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or senior individual contributor, owning architecture and guiding engineering teams.

• Experience collaborating with product managers and brand stakeholders to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions.

• Comfort adopting AI-assisted development workflows.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field is preferred.

Our Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Plans for you and your family (paid by Dow Jones)

• Extra paid Time Off (30 days of holidays/year)

• Possibility to work remotely for 3 months/year (desplazamiento program) or one week of remote work per quarter

• Meal benefit with Pluxee (171€/month on top of your salary)

• Retirement Plans (Dow Jones will pay 2% of a members Pensionable Salary and match employee contribution up to a maximum of 3 %).

• Comprehensive Insurance Plans

• Well-being Resources (200 USD allowance per quarter, Classpass, etc.)

• Family Care Benefits & Caregiving Support

• Subscription Discounts

• Employee Referral Program(2,500 USD for referring a talent)

Learn more about us and our benefits click here.

Equal Opportunity Employer

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status or any other protected characteristic.

We strongly encourage applications from all qualified individuals, including women, people with disabilities, and those from underrepresented groups.

Reasonable Accommodation

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodation for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application and/or interview process. If you need assistance or accommodation in completing your application or participating in an interview due to a disability, email us at [e-mail]. Please put "Reasonable Accommodation" in the subject line and provide a brief description of the type of assistance you need. This inbox will not be monitored for application status updates.

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Business Area

Dow Jones - Technology

Job Category

Software Product Engineering

Union Status

Non-Union role

Base Pay Range

€80,000 - €90,000

We’re committed to offering competitive and flexible compensation to attract top talent. This pay range reflects our good faith estimate for the role and may vary based on a candidate’s experience, skills, location, and other relevant factors.

For bonus-eligible roles, targets are determined based on multiple considerations, including market benchmarks and individual contributions.

For benefits-eligible roles, we offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package covering health, retirement, wellbeing, and more, along with optional benefits to meet the diverse needs of our employees.