Staff/Sr. Software Engineer, Search Data Infrastructure

Role Overview

• Design and develop scalable, resilient offline indexing pipelines that process and transform data for Slack's search infrastructure
• Partner with product engineering to conceptualize and ship new features for our large — and rapidly growing — user base
• Ensure high availability and reliability across our distributed search systems through thoughtful collaboration and rigorous engineering
• Drive significant business impact by contributing heavily to high-priority team projects
• Take long-term ownership of team features and systems, proactively improving their health and the health of surrounding services
• Deploy, configure, test, troubleshoot, maintain, and upgrade Solr clusters and environments
• Continuously optimize Solr cluster infrastructure and configuration to sustain cluster health and search performance
• Support our operations and customer-facing teams in triaging and resolving production issues efficiently
• Conduct thorough, collaborative code reviews that raise the quality bar across the team
• Champion improvements to engineering standards, tooling, and development processes
• Build and ship production-grade software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core pillar of your development workflow
• Design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows, driving efficiency and innovation at scale
• Contribute to building and maintaining a shared system context — an explicit repository of system designs, constraints, and standards that enables AI to operate accurately and reliably
• Critically evaluate code (human
• or AI-generated) for correctness, quality, security, and performance.

Requirements

• 10+ years of hands-on experience with distributed data and search technologies
• Have worked extensively with distributed data processing frameworks such as Spark, Hadoop, MapReduce, or EMR
• Experience with Solr, Elasticsearch, Lucene, or comparable search technologies
• Are familiar with infrastructure and ops tooling such as Terraform, Chef, and Kubernetes
• Proficiency in functional or imperative programming languages — e.g., PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, C, or Java
• Track record of building high-availability, performant, and scalable systems that handle large volumes of data across multiple clusters in geographically distributed environments
• Experience planning, implementing, and executing software migrations and upgrades in production environments
• Confidence in contributing to technical architecture discussions and influencing technical decisions within your team
• Bring a genuine, demonstrated AI-first approach to engineering — using AI to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty
• Have experience integrating AI development tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor) into day-to-day engineering workflows
• Possess advanced prompt engineering skills — writing precise, structured prompts and cultivating system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production-ready.

Tech Stack

• Chef
• ElasticSearch
• Hadoop
• Java
• Kubernetes
• MapReduce
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• Spark
• Terraform
• Go

Benefits

• time off programs
• medical, dental, vision, mental health support
• paid parental leave
• life and disability insurance
• 401(k)
• employee stock purchasing program