Lead Software Engineer, Search & Relevance AI

engineeringjobs.net, Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 134,000 - 224,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

401(k) retirement plan

PTO & holidays

Tuition reimbursement

Student loan refinancing

Financial counseling

Maternity leave

Job summary

Grainger is seeking a Lead Software Engineer (Software Engineer IV) to develop applications aligned with a strategic vision, mentor engineers, and partner with Product Managers and Architecture. You will focus on search relevance for Grainger's product catalog, spanning lexical and semantic retrieval, and collaborate with Data Science and Analytics to measure impact.

You will design, build, and improve search systems, develop ranking strategies, and run experiments to ensure high-quality results

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent in computer science or related field.
• 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer with scalable software development across diverse technologies.
• Expert knowledge of Java and Python.
• Experience with distributed system design, sharding, indexing, caching, and query routing.
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum, DevOps practices, and AI-assisted development tools.
• Hands-on experience with embeddings and vector search, including ANN indexing.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineer on a team delivering high-quality, maintainable software for complex applications.
• Influence engineering practices to enable continuous delivery and reliable releases.
• Lead knowledge sharing sessions on new technologies and engineering practices.
• Triage and resolve production issues, maintaining software in production.
• Mentor developers, conduct code reviews, and participate in pair programming.
• Collaborate with IT management to ensure successful design and delivery of solutions.
• Design, build, and improve search systems using lexical and semantic retrieval approaches.
• Develop and optimize ranking strategies, including hybrid retrieval and learning-to-rank methods.
• Evaluate search quality with offline metrics and online experiments; build repeatable tooling for relevance experiments.

Skills

Java

Python

Embeddings & vector search

Distributed systems

Agile/Scrum

DevOps

Education

Bachelor's Degree or equivalent

Job description

Grainger is seeking a Lead Software Engineer (Software Engineer IV) to develop applications aligned with a strategic vision, mentor engineers, and partner with Product Managers and Architecture. You will focus on search relevance for Grainger's product catalog, spanning lexical and semantic retrieval, and collaborate with Data Science and Analytics to measure impact.

You will design, build, and improve search systems, develop ranking strategies, and run experiments to ensure high-quality results