Senior Software Engineer - AI-powered Discovery & Search

IMDb.com; Santa Monica (CA); On-site; USD 168,000 - 227,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

RSUs

Job summary

IMDb.com is hiring a Senior Software Development Engineer to own architecture for core discovery and AI-native enhancements. You will lead multi-engineer projects across search, retrieval, and ranking on IMDb's AWS OpenSearch stack, shaping scale, performance, and reliability while mentoring engineers and aligning with product roadmaps.

You will influence the design of end-to-end systems, drive platform improvements, and partner with teams to deliver a modern AI-powered discovery experience

Qualifications

• 6+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.
• 6+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience.
• 6+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience.
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the development and technical strategy of key system features for IMDb's search platform on AWS OpenSearch Service - index design, relevance tuning, query performance, and scaling.
• Own the architecture for a significant area of the discovery platform (search/retrieval, ranking, or the list platform), providing a system-wide view and design guidance across the team.
• Lead the design and delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects end to end - scoping, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations - breaking work into parallel streams and integrating it into a coherent whole.
• Build intelligent retrieval and ML-powered ranking, plus platform capabilities (API contracts, versioned SLOs, typed SDKs) for downstream and AI-agent consumers.
• Raise the operational bar: own alarms, telemetry, runbooks, and COE practices, balancing velocity against reliability on the critical path.
• Review designs and code across the team to ensure solutions are well-designed, extensible, performant, and secure; drive adoption of engineering best practices.
• Identify and resolve architecture deficiencies and systemic operational issues, including those where the platform bottlenecks other teams' innovation.
• Mentor engineers and partner with product and program management to shape the discovery roadmap.
• Contribute to AI-native platform practices - steering files, structured knowledge, and agent-readable interfaces for your codebases.

Skills

Distributed systems

Architecture leadership

Mentoring

OpenSearch

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

AWS OpenSearch Service

Elasticsearch

GraphQL/REST APIs

Job description

IMDb.com is hiring a Senior Software Development Engineer to own architecture for core discovery and AI-native enhancements. You will lead multi-engineer projects across search, retrieval, and ranking on IMDb's AWS OpenSearch stack, shaping scale, performance, and reliability while mentoring engineers and aligning with product roadmaps.

You will influence the design of end-to-end systems, drive platform improvements, and partner with teams to deliver a modern AI-powered discovery experience