Staff Engineer - Search

Kurz zusammengefasst

Staffbase is a fast‑growing, AI‑native employee experience platform that powers intranets, employee apps and email solutions for more than 1,500 customers worldwide. With headquarters in Chemnitz, Germany and New York City and offices across Europe, Asia and the United States, the company supports over 14 million employees and is valued at over $1 billion. The role of Staff Engineer, Search sits at the core of the platform, responsible for ensuring every employee can locate the right information quickly and securely, while also delivering AI‑generated answers that cite their sources. In this position you will shape the overall search and retrieval strategy, combining hybrid BM25 and vector‑based techniques, query understanding, rewriting, and embedding choices. You will design, build, and continuously improve the ingestion and query pipelines that move data from synchronization and indexing through to ranked results and AI‑summarised answers. Ownership of search quality is essential: you will create evaluation tools, maintain golden query sets, including unanswerable and permission‑sensitive cases, define relevance metrics and use data‑driven insights to guide improvements. The role requires deep expertise with the technologies that power Staffbase's search stack. You must be proficient in Kotlin and Java for backend development, and experienced with OpenSearch/Elasticsearch for indexing and retrieval. Familiarity with MongoDB, React, TypeScript, Terraform, Docker and Playwright is also required, as is hands‑on experience integrating large‑language‑model and embedding services for retrieval, reranking and summarisation. A strong understanding of multi‑tenant architectures, permission handling and performance optimisation at scale is essential. Staffbase promotes a diverse, inclusive and flexible work environment that values well‑being and work‑life balance. The Search team collaborates closely with other engineers, product owners and data scientists, applying a "you build it, you run it" mindset. You will work alongside skilled professionals who share a passion for technology and its potential to improve the world, with opportunities to influence a high‑impact product used by millions of employees globally. What the role asks for: - Proficiency in Kotlin - Proficiency in Java - Experience with OpenSearch/Elasticsearch - Experience with MongoDB - Experience with React and TypeScript - Experience with Terraform and Docker - Experience with Playwright - Experience integrating LLM and embedding services