Senior Java Engineer - AI-Driven Search Platform

SAP; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 149,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Flexible working

Job summary

SAP is seeking Senior Software Engineers to lead the design and evolution of a state‑of‑the‑art Search Platform, blending traditional information retrieval with AI and LLM‑driven capabilities. You will influence architecture, drive performance, and craft scalable systems for web‑scale datasets.

You will work with product, data science, and engineering teams in a hybrid Palo Alto/San Ramon setting, delivering robust ranking, real‑time pipelines, and secure services while mentoring peers and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 8+ years of backend or distributed systems development.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with large-scale data processing or streaming systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build highly scalable, low-latency distributed search systems.
• Design and optimize large-scale indexing pipelines and retrieval systems.
• Drive hybrid search architecture (BM25 + vector + LLM reranking).
• Lead design and development of backend services and REST APIs using Java and Spring.
• Build real-time and batch data pipelines using streaming frameworks.
• Design event-driven architectures leveraging message brokers such as Kafka.
• Improve search relevance and ranking quality using ML/NLP and LTR techniques.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across indexing and query layers.
• Define search quality metrics, evaluation frameworks, and experimentation strategies.
• Ensure system reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance using distributed system best practices.
• Own end-to-end lifecycle of microservices (design, development, deployment, operations).
• Implement security best practices (authentication, authorization, data protection).
• Lead technical design discussions and influence architectural decisions.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design guidance, and best practices.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Data Science, and AI teams

Skills

Java & JVM

Spring Framework

Distributed systems

Search & IR

ML / NLP

Leadership

Mentoring

REST APIs

Data streaming

Kafka

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS

Tools

Kafka

Solr

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Apache Beam

Spark

Kubernetes

Jenkins

Maven

Job description

SAP is seeking Senior Software Engineers to lead the design and evolution of a state‑of‑the‑art Search Platform, blending traditional information retrieval with AI and LLM‑driven capabilities. You will influence architecture, drive performance, and craft scalable systems for web‑scale datasets.

You will work with product, data science, and engineering teams in a hybrid Palo Alto/San Ramon setting, delivering robust ranking, real‑time pipelines, and secure services while mentoring peers and