Senior Software Engineer (Search / Retrieval)

Workato

Palo Alto (CA)

On-site

USD 150,000 - 200,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

A leading technology company is seeking a Senior Software Engineer specializing in Search/Retrieval. The candidate will lead the design and optimization of intelligent search systems leveraging machine learning. The ideal applicant will have a deep understanding of information retrieval, experience in backend engineering, and a passion for solving complex search challenges. This role offers a dynamic working environment in Palo Alto, California.

Qualifications

7+ years of backend engineering experience with 3+ years in search or information retrieval.
Strong proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with search engines.
Experience with relevance evaluation metrics like NDCG, MRR, MAP.

Responsibilities

Lead the development of advanced search systems for millions of documents.
Deploy learning-to-rank models to optimize relevance.
Architect next-gen search infrastructure and drive improvements in performance.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

Search engines (Opensearch or Elasticsearch)

Information retrieval concepts

Text processing and NLP

Large-scale distributed systems

Education

Bachelors/Masters/PhD in Statistics, Mathematics, or Computer Science

Job description

About Workato

Workato transforms technology complexity into business opportunity. As the leader in enterprise orchestration, Workato helps businesses globally streamline operations by connecting data, processes, applications, and experiences. Its AI-powered platform enables teams to navigate complex workflows in real-time, driving efficiency and agility.

Trusted by a community of 400,000 global customers, Workato empowers organizations of every size to unlock new value and lead in today’s fast-changing world. Learn how Workato helps businesses of all sizes achieve more at workato.com.

Why join us?

Ultimately, Workato believes in fostering a flexible, trust-oriented culture that empowers everyone to take full ownership of their roles. We are driven by innovation and looking for team players who want to actively build our company.

But, we also believe in balancing productivity with self-care. That’s why we offer all of our employees a vibrant and dynamic work environment along with a multitude of benefits they can enjoy inside and outside of their work lives.

If this sounds right up your alley, please submit an application. We look forward to getting to know you!

Also, feel free to check out why:

Business Insider named us an “enterprise startup to bet your career on”
Forbes’ Cloud 100 recognized us as one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world
Deloitte Tech Fast 500 ranked us as the 17th fastest growing tech company in the Bay Area, and 96th in North America
Quartz ranked us the #1 best company for remote workers

Responsibilities

We are looking for an exceptional Senior Software Engineer (Search / Retrieval) to join our growing team. In this role, you will lead the design, development, and optimization of intelligent search systems that leverage machine learning at their core. You’ll be responsible for building end-to-end retrieval pipelines that incorporate advanced techniques in query understanding, ranking, and entity recognition. The ideal candidate combines deep expertise in information retrieval and search relevance with hands-on experience applying machine learning to real-world search problems at scale. You will also be responsible to:

Lead the development of advanced our search cluster that can scale to millions of documents across customers and data sources
Deploy learning-to-rank models that optimize relevance using behavioral signals, embeddings, and structured feedback.
Build and scale robust Entity Recognition pipelines that enhance document understanding, enable contextual disambiguation, and support entity-aware retrieval.
Architect next-gen search infrastructure capable of supporting highly dynamic document corpora and real-time indexing.
Drive improvements in query construction, indexing and search performance
Be up-to-date with the latest improvements in search and indexing technologies
Collaborate with product and applied research teams to translate user needs into data-informed search innovations
Produce clean, scalable code and influence system architecture and roadmap across the relevance and platform stack.

Qualifications

Bachelors/Masters/PhD degree in Statistics, Mathematics or Computer Science, or another quantitative field.
7+ years of backend engineering experience with 3+ years in search, information retrieval, or related fields
Strong proficiency in Python
Hands-on experience with search engines (Opensearch or Elasticsearch)
Strong understanding of information retrieval concepts spanning traditional methods (TF-IDF, BM25) and modern neural search techniques (vector embeddings, transformer models)
Experience with text processing, NLP, and relevance tuning
Experience with relevance evaluation metrics (NDCG, MRR, MAP)
Experience with large-scale distributed systems
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

Soft Skills / Personal Characteristics