Staff Software Engineer, Search

SiriusXM Radio, Inc.; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 101,500 - 195,000; Full time

Job summary

SiriusXM Radio, Inc. in Houston is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to enhance its content discovery across platforms. You will be responsible for designing and scaling search infrastructure while driving architectural decisions that impact millions of users.

The ideal candidate will have 7+ years of software engineering experience, especially in Java, and strong expertise in AWS, distributed systems, and search frameworks. This is an opportunity for technical leaders to make a significant impact.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building large-scale backend systems.
• Deep experience with search frameworks and metadata indexing.
• Expert-level experience with AWS services.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate scalable microservices for search services.
• Drive architectural evolution of indexing and retrieval systems.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams.

Skills

Java

Python

AWS

Distributed Systems

Microservices

Search Frameworks

Job description

How you'll make an impact

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will help make SiriusXM's massive content catalog easily discoverable across automotive and mobile platforms. You'll work on the core search infrastructure that powers how millions of users find content every day. In this role, you'll design, scale, and evolve distributed search systems that retrieve high-quality results at scale. You'll drive architectural decisions, own complex, business‑critical components, and establish best practices as the team and platform grow. You'll also play a pivotal role in exploring new ML models, re‑architecting our search services, improving scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in ambiguity, is technically pragmatic, and can make strong architectural decisions in imperfect, real‑world conditions. You'll collaborate closely with content services teams, product partners, ML/science teams, and downstream client applications to deliver cutting‑edge search experiences.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate well‑architected, scalable microservices for the search services stack.
• Drive architectural evolution of indexing, retrieval, and serving pipelines from prototype to production.
• Evaluate, fine‑tune, and integrate off‑the‑shelf LLM models, rapidly prototyping where needed.
• Drive cross‑functional initiatives, collaborating with product, science, design, and infrastructure partners.
• Act as a strong technical bridge between science/ML and engineering teams.
• Partner with the Voice Search team to eliminate redundancies and enhance the overall search ecosystem.
• Influence and uphold engineering best practices, mentoring other engineers as the team scales.

What you'll need

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building large‑scale backend systems in Java, building backend microservices and scalable distributed systems.
• 3+ years of experience with Python.
• Deep experience with search frameworks, metadata indexing, and retrieval systems.
• Proven experience leading complex, cross‑functional technical initiatives.
• Expert‑level experience with AWS, including deploying applications using services such as EC2, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, ElastiCache, and IAM.
• Strong foundation in object‑oriented design, system design, and design patterns.
• Proven ability to make sound architectural trade‑offs while maintaining long‑term extensibility.
• Comfort working across system boundaries (infrastructure, ML, and adjacent service domains).
• Ability to handle multiple tasks in a fast‑paced environment.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
• Willingness to take initiative and to follow through on projects.
• Excellent time management skills, with the ability to prioritize and multitask, and work under shifting deadlines in a fast‑paced environment.
• Must have legal right to work in the U.S.

At SiriusXM, we carefully consider a wide range of factors when determining compensation, including your background and experience. These considerations can cause your compensation to vary. We expect the base salary for this position to be in the range of $101,500 to $195,000 and will depend on your skills, qualifications, and experience. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short‑term and long‑term incentives. We encourage all interested candidates to apply.

Our goal at SiriusXM is to provide and maintain a work environment that fosters mutual respect, professionalism and cooperation. SiriusXM is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, alienage or citizenship status, age, disability or handicap, sex, gender identity, marital status, familial status, veteran status, sexual orientation or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws.