Staff Search Platform Engineer: Scale & Relevance

Rippling (Netherlands); Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 189,000 - 315,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is seeking the primary technical authority for Search, designing cross-platform primitives and partnering with Product leadership to shape the roadmap. You will own architecture for indexing, retrieval, relevance, and query performance at scale, collaborating with Product, Data Cloud, platform, and AI teams to build shared search primitives powering multiple Rippling product surfaces.

You will lead the technical vision for search systems, tackle hybrid retrieval and vector search

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend/platform engineering with ownership of distributed systems in production.
• Deep experience in search infrastructure, indexing, and relevance tuning.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or Java.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the technical vision for Rippling search systems: indexing pipelines, query serving, ranking/relevance, and retrieval quality measurement.
• Tackle open-ended challenges in hybrid retrieval, semantic/vector search, and metadata ranking to push the boundaries of what our platform can do.
• Build and operate resilient, high-performance infrastructure (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch) capable of supporting 10x scale growth while maintaining rigorous standards for latency, freshness, correctness and cost-efficiency.
• Define relevance strategy and evaluation: offline benchmarks, quality metrics, and production monitoring.
• Build reusable search platform abstractions used by multiple Rippling products.
• Elevate the entire engineering organization through strategic design reviews, mentorship, and the establishment of "best-in-class" operational standards.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Search infrastructure

Python/Go/Java

Tools

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Solr/Lucene-style

Job description

Rippling is seeking the primary technical authority for Search, designing cross-platform primitives and partnering with Product leadership to shape the roadmap. You will own architecture for indexing, retrieval, relevance, and query performance at scale, collaborating with Product, Data Cloud, platform, and AI teams to build shared search primitives powering multiple Rippling product surfaces.

You will lead the technical vision for search systems, tackle hybrid retrieval and vector search