Software Engineer II, 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 growing!) user base.
• Collaborate with team members to ensure high availability and reliability of a distributed search system at massive scale.
• Own team features and systems end-to-end, defining their long-term health while proactively improving the health of surrounding systems.
• Deploy, configure, test, troubleshoot, maintain, and upgrade Solr clusters and environments.
• Continuously optimize the infrastructure and configuration of our Solr clusters to maintain cluster health and peak search performance.
• Support our skilled operations team in triaging and resolving production issues quickly and effectively.
• Raise the bar on engineering standards, tooling, and processes across the team.
• Build and ship high-quality, production-grade software using modern engineering practices — with AI as a core part 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 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

• 4+ years of applicable software engineering experience
• worked extensively with distributed data processing frameworks such as Spark, Hadoop, MapReduce, or EMR
• hands-on experience with Solr, Elasticsearch, Lucene, or other search technologies
• familiar with infrastructure/ops tools and frameworks such as Terraform, Chef, and Kubernetes
• proficient with 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 data volumes across multiple clusters and geographic regions
• experience planning, implementing, and deploying software migrations and upgrades in production environments
• can contribute meaningfully to technical architecture discussions and help drive sound technical decisions within your team
• strong communicator — able to explain complex technical concepts clearly to designers, support staff, and fellow engineers
• solid computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, programming languages, distributed systems, and information retrieval
• genuine, demonstrated AI-first approach to engineering — using AI tools to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute beyond your core specialty
• experience integrating AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor) into your development workflow
• advanced prompt engineering skills — able to write precise, structured prompts and cultivate the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production-ready

Tech Stack

• Chef
• Distributed Systems
• 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