Senior Software Engineer (Search & AI)

• As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll help build and evolve the customer-facing search experiences that help users discover relevant, high-quality content, along with the backend systems that power them. You’ll work across the stack, with a slight emphasis on frontend development, and collaborate closely with engineers, Product, and Design to deliver intuitive search experiences backed by reliable, scalable search and data systems
• Own and deliver customer-facing search features and workflows across frontend and backend systems, from technical planning through production
• Build AI-powered product experiences end to end, from the services behind them to the interfaces that make their output useful and trustworthy
• Build intuitive, responsive user experiences using Vue while contributing to the Python and Django services that power them
• Design and improve search, indexing, and retrieval systems that support high-quality content discovery across large volumes of data
• Build and maintain features and data workflows that leverage technologies such as Elasticsearch, Kafka, Celery, and MySQL
• Make thoughtful technical decisions and trade-offs that balance customer experience, delivery speed, performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and engineering teammates to shape solutions, clarify requirements, and deliver high-quality customer experiences
• Troubleshoot complex production issues and drive improvements to the performance, reliability, observability, and maintainability of the systems you work on
• Participate in an on-call and incident response rotation, helping diagnose and resolve production issues and improve system reliability over time

Benefits

• Fully distributed - Much Rack are committed to a permanent, fully remote environment, core to the way they do business.
• Geo-neutral compensation - Much Rack believe in equitable pay regardless of where you live.
• Time off - 4+ weeks off-the-grid vacation, sick and mental health days, and company holidays.
• Insurance - Health, vision, and dental coverage paid at 100% for individuals
• Retirement planning - MUck Rack contribute 3% of your annual salary to your 401k automatically.
• Paid parental leave - 8 weeks fully paid bonding for all parents + up to 8 weeks fully paid recovery from childbirth.
• Full WFH set up - Including monthly phone/internet reimbursement and coworking stipend.
• Learning & development - Take advantage of unlimited access to learning platforms and regular training opportunities.
• No meeting Fridays - Take control of your calendar, and make time for reflection and deep-focus tasks

• Experience with Elasticsearch or a comparable search technology, or significant experience working with data-intensive systems
• Experience building polished, maintainable user-facing applications with Vue.js or another modern JavaScript framework
• Experience with design systems or shared component libraries
• Strong experience working across frontend and backend systems and independently delivering features throughout the application stack
• Experience making technical trade-offs within complex production systems while balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term quality
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and maintaining production software
• Proficiency with Python or a similar programming language and experience with Django or a comparable web framework
• Flexibility to adjust working hours for overlap with teammates in US time zones
• Experience diagnosing production issues and contributing to the reliability and operational health of the systems you build
• Experience with TypeScript in a large codebase
• Proactively incorporates AI tools into day-to-day work to improve productivity and accelerate delivery
• Take pride in building readable, testable, maintainable software while making pragmatic technical trade-offs
• Communicate complex technical ideas clearly and collaborate effectively with both technical and non-technical partners
• Take ownership of problems and drive work forward independently while knowing when to involve others
• Approach ambiguous or complex problems thoughtfully and use sound judgment to identify effective solutions
• Contribute to a strong engineering culture through thoughtful code reviews, knowledge sharing, feedback, and continuous improvement
• Experience with Kafka or other streaming or event-driven technologies
• Experience with MySQL, Postgres, or other relational databases
• Experience with Celery or other asynchronous task-processing systems
• Experience building search, discovery, indexing, or information-retrieval features
• Experience improving frontend architecture, performance, or complex customer-facing workflows
• Experience working with high-traffic SaaS applications or systems that process large volumes of data
• Experience judging whether an AI-backed feature is actually working, through evaluation, testing, or user feedback
• Experience building customer-facing features backed by LLMs or other AI models
• Interest in journalism, news, media, or social media

• Below you’ll find an outline of the interview plan for this role. Please note that this is what we expect the process to look like; we may ask you for supplemental information or require an additional step before making a final decision
• 30 min interview with a member of our Talent Team
• A 1 hour zoom interview with the hiring manager
• Peer interviews with several team members
• 30-minute Bar Raiser