Senior Software Developer, Search

MaintainX (An Autodesk Company); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

MaintainX, now part of Autodesk, is hiring a Senior Search Platform Engineer in San Francisco to design, build, and operate production-grade search systems. You will work across indexing pipelines, embeddings, and retrieval strategies to deliver highly relevant results for work orders, assets, and procedures.

You will drive architectural decisions, optimize distributed systems, and own integrations with upstream data sources while collaborating with product and engineering leaders to align

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating production-grade search systems end-to-end.
• Experience with embeddings, retrieval strategies, and semantic search.
• Ability to lead platform engineering priorities and communicate with executives.

Responsibilities

• Design and build end-to-end search and retrieval platform — from indexing pipelines to AI-facing query layers.
• Partner with product and domain experts to model search across work orders, assets, and procedures to ensure high-relevance results.
• Ship fast, iterate fast, launch early versions, gather feedback, and improve rapidly.
• Operate and optimize distributed systems for reliability, performance, and scalability under real-world load.
• Drive architectural decisions, balancing correctness, performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Own integrations between search systems and upstream data sources.
• Explore semantic search, vector retrieval, and AI-enhanced relevance using modern ML tooling.
• On-call duties (currently business hours)

Skills

Search systems

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Relevance tuning

Distributed systems

English proficiency

Tools

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

Lucene

Solr

LLM tooling

Job description

MaintainX is a leading mobile-first work execution platform for industrial and frontline teams. More than 13,000 customers, including Duracell, McDonald's, Shell, DHL and Volvo, use MaintainX to cut unplanned downtime and run better operations, across 13.9 million managed assets and 79.5 million completed work orders.

In August 2026 MaintainX became part of Autodesk, joining Autodesk Operations Solutions, the organization unifying Autodesk's operations platform alongside Tandem, FlexSim and Fusion Operations. Autodesk's strategy is to converge design, make and operate into one continuous lifecycle: design an asset, build it, run it, then feed what you learn running it back into the next design. Autodesk had design and make. Operate is the phase that tells you what actually happened, and it is ours.

What You'll Do:

• Design and build MaintainX’s end-to-end search and retrieval platform — from indexing pipelines and ranking systems to AI-facing query layers.
• Partner with product and domain experts to model search across core entities like work orders, assets, and procedures, ensuring high-relevance results.
• Ship fast, iterate fast, launch early versions, gather feedback, and improve rapidly.
• Operate and optimize distributed systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and scalability under real-world load.
• Drive architectural decisions, balancing correctness, performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Own integrations between search systems and upstream data sources.
• Explore semantic search, vector retrieval, and AI-enhanced relevance using modern ML tooling.
• On-call duties (currently business hours)

About You:

• Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating production-grade search systems end-to-end — including indexing, query execution, relevance tuning, and infrastructure — using technologies such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Lucene, Solr, or similar.
• Understanding of embeddings, chunking, and retrieval strategies.
• Familiarity with search-specific tuning: analyzers, BM25, shard sizing, cluster health, and relevance optimization.
• Comfort taking systems from implementation to deployment and production operation, working across backend services, data pipelines, and integration points as needed.
• An expert level of English, both spoken and written, is required, as the individual will need to lead platform engineering managers across multiple teams, present technical priorities to executive stakeholders, and align with engineering leaders outside Québec on a daily basis.

Nice to Have:

• Experience evaluating and improving search relevance using both qualitative analysis and quantitative metrics.
• Experience shipping AI-powered or LLM-integrated backend systems
• Comfortable using modern AI tools like GPT, Copilot, or Cursor to boost productivity and streamline development.
• Understanding of multi-tenancy and data security, including ACLs, field-level access controls, and secure index partitioning.
• Experience building observability and success metrics into systems to monitor performance, usage, and impact.

Our mission is to keep the physical world running. Factories, fleets, hospitals and campuses stay up because the people who maintain them have tools worth using. That is what we build.

Compensation and benefits.

Base pay is one part of the package. Depending on the role, compensation may also include commission, an annual bonus and equity. Benefits differ by country. For roles in the United States, Autodesk’s benefits are described at benefits.autodesk.com. For roles in Canada and other countries, the plan differs on health coverage, retirement and leave, and your recruiter will walk you through it.

Belonging.

We take pride in a culture where everyone can thrive. More at autodesk.com/company/global-belonging. More on where this is going: Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost on building the future of connected operations, and AOS SVP Stephen Hooper on welcoming MaintainX to Autodesk.