Senior Backend Software Engineer, Search

Hungryroot is looking for a Senior Search Engineer to join their growing Engineering team. This role involves owning and evolving their OpenSearch-powered search platform, driving the technical design and implementation of search features that enhance product discovery for customers.

Responsibilities:

• Own the search service end-to-end: index design, query pipelines, relevance tuning, cluster health, scaling, and upgrades of our OpenSearch infrastructure
• Drive important technical discussions around search architecture, hybrid retrieval strategies, embedding model selection, scoring/normalization pipelines, and personalization and help the team arrive at the best possible solution given any constraints we may face
• Work closely with engineering leads and product stakeholders to translate business requirements (e.g., new facets, dietary filtering, personalized ranking) into performant search features
• Contribute directly to feature development across the search stack: document mapping, query builders, function scoring, KNN vector search, and the text embeddings inference sidecar
• Incorporate AI-powered development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) into daily workflows to accelerate prototyping, code review, debugging, and documentation, and help establish best practices for the team's adoption of these tools
• Help raise the bar on code quality and enforce engineering discipline through code review feedback, testing, technical presentations, and opportunistic refactoring
• Participate in the interview process for other senior, mid, or junior engineering candidates and contribute to hiring decisions

Requirements:

• 5+ yrs of commercial software development experience
• 3+ yrs of hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch (index design, cluster management, query DSL)
• 2+ yrs of experience with semantic/vector search techniques (KNN, approximate nearest neighbor algorithms such as HNSW, embedding models)
• 3+ yrs of experience using Python and the wider ecosystem as the primary day-to-day environment
• 2+ yrs of experience building and tuning search relevance (BM25, function scoring, hybrid retrieval pipelines)
• 2+ yrs of experience troubleshooting production issues in search or data-intensive systems
• Active experience using AI-powered developer tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) to augment coding, debugging, and problem-solving workflows
• Experience with AWS OpenSearch Service (managed clusters, fine-grained access control, index state management)
• 2+ yrs of experience working with a web framework such as Django (preferred), Flask, or similar
• Familiarity with text embedding models and inference serving (e.g., Hugging Face TEI, sentence-transformers)
• Experience with search observability, query analytics, A/B testing search relevance, and monitoring cluster performance
• Experience with Django REST Framework and building search APIs
• Proficient in leveraging modern AI-powered developer tooling
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC tools such as Terraform)
• Proficiency working with Git
• A bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field