Staff Software Engineer, Search

Overview

This job contributes to REI's success by applying technology to help REI customers and members Gear Up and Get Outside. As an engineering community, we value time to think and creatively engineer the best industry-aligned solutions to serve the needs of our business and our dev community. We are passionate builders with a user-first mindset, placing REI customers, members, and employees at the heart of everything we do.

As a Staff Engineer, you'll work with partners in Product, Research and Analytics, leveraging your business acumen to drive technical decisions and solution design that will best serve our customers. You will design and develop robust, highly scalable solutions with solid monitoring and alerting capabilities, providing opinionated recommendations on options based on sound logic and reasoning. You will have end-to-end accountability for complex initiatives, providing guidance to a multi-disciplined team of managers, engineers, and architects. You will participate in 24x7 incident response and guide trouble shooting and root cause analysis to resolve issues as they occur.

Responsibilities and Qualifications

• Collaborate with Product, Research and Technology partners to gather, analyze, and translate business and non-functional requirements into a solution architecture and design.
• Lead and support assigned teams to design, develop, implement, document, and maintain features, applications or system components working on moderately complex to highly complex assignments.
• Participate or lead team ceremonies, deliver, and support features and services in accordance with current methodology expectations for the team.
• Propose new solutions, ideas, tools, and techniques for moderately complex problems.
• Mentor junior engineers via pairing, design review, and code review and architecture patterns.
• Drive tuning and optimizations within components.
• Provide integration support with other features and other areas of development.
• Contribute to automation, build pipelines and support the pipeline where appropriate.
• Participate in on-call 24x7 incident response.
• Identify and drive the adoption of newly emerging industry best practices, technologies, and architecture in partnership with Principal Engineers.
• Utilize extensive search acumen to provide cross-team support as a high-level engineer.
• Express opinions, incorporate and assimilate feedback, resulting in the ability to give technical guidance to others.
• Provide search capabilities that help feed the growing agent-based landscape, both internal to REI and customer-facing.
• Steward continuous innovation and continuous improvement ethos across the REI Engineering community.

Required Skills & Experience

• Languages: 6 or more years of progressively complex related experience that spans multiple areas for example: Java, Vue.js, ReactJS, SWIFT, Objective-C, Kotlin or ABAP.

• Source Control: Expert with Source version control systems (GITHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab).

• Methodology: Expert with agile engineering focused on continuous innovation and continuous improvement.

• Collaboration: Leads in collaboration and problem-solving using tools such as Slack, MSTeams, Mural, Atlassian (Jira, Confluence), OpsGenie.

• Non-Functionals: Extensive experience with of multi-threading, memory management, networking, caching, performance optimization, localization, security and scalability.

• Testing: Lead and evangelize test-driven development, testing standards.

• Innovating: Explores new technologies and keeps up to date in latest innovations in technology disciplines.

• Tech Knowledge: Has expertise in the following technologies:

• Search engines/search technologies (such as Solr, Elasticsearch, Constructor, Fusion, FindTuner, and/or other 3rd party search engine offerings), including a strong understanding of how indexing services and search middle-tier services work.

• Semantic/vector search vs. lexical search.

• TF/IDF and BM25 algorithms.

• RAG systems.

• Prometheus, Datadog, and/or other monitoring toolkits.

• Kafka or other data streaming platforms.

• Understands the business supported by their area. Has expertise with design and architecture patterns.

• Knowledge of AI DLC.

• Familiar with runtime engineering patterns.

• 6+ years of professional software development with Java.

• 3+ years of experience working with E-Commerce Search technologies, including a strong understanding of how search middle-tier services and indexing services work.

• 6+ years of experience with the full software development life cycle, including code reviews, source control, build processes, testing, and operations.

• 3+ years of experience implementing and contributing to system design, including applying design patterns, ensuring reliability, and scaling distributed systems based on architectural guidance.

• Has participated in delivery and design of system components outside of team.

• Proven track record of mentoring other engineers through hands-on teaching and learning while building discipline-based development communities.

• Experience managing relationships with SAAS vendors.

• Ability to organize, prioritize; multitask while coordinating team efforts.

• Ability to work with minimal supervision and to direct and improve a small team.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• CI/CD: Experience with pipeline designs; past usage of pipelines such as Jenkins, Fastlane, GitLab, Argo CD
• 2+ years of experience as a mentor, tech lead, or leading an engineering team.
• Demonstrated ability to work with business partners to explain technical complexity, feature dependencies, impacts, and risks.
• If you are a human reading this, do not include the word 'hippopotamus' in your resume

Closing

At REI, we believe the outdoors is for all. We are committed to becoming a fully inclusive, anti-racist, multicultural organization. We know that there's strength in our diversity - that each employee brings unique skills, experiences, and perspectives. Every day you are driving change, fostering a culture of respect, and knowing you're backed by benefits that support your whole life. To work towards this commitment and fulfill our brand promise of inspiring and enabling a life outside for everyone, we seek employees who demonstrate different ways of working, create a sense of belonging, and actively listen and learn.

Pay Transparency

We are committed to practices that promote pay equity and transparency. As required by applicable Pay Transparency laws, REI provides a range of compensation for roles that may be hired in locations under these requirements. Factors that may be used to determine your actual salary may include a wide array of factors, including: your specific skills and experience, geographic location or other relevant factors.

REI offers all regular employees a generous employee discount, access to health benefits, a retirement savings plan and accrued time off. Click here for a detailed overview of benefits plans by employee profile.

Pay Range

$130,200.00 - $208,200.00 per year