Staff Software Engineer, Search

• 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.

• 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

REI offers all regular employees a generous employee discount, access to health benefits, a retirement savings plan and accrued time off. Click here (https://foryourbenefit-rei.com/) for a detailed overview of benefits plans by employee profile.

Pay Range

$130,200.00 - $208,200.00 per year

At REI, we believe the outdoors is for all . We are committed to becoming a fully inclusive, anti-racist, multicultural organization (https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/rei-antiracist-multicultural-fully-inclusive-commitment) . 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.