Senior Backend Software Engineer, Search

Role overview

Hungryroot is hiring a Senior Search Engineer to own and evolve its OpenSearch-powered search platform ("hrsearch"). The role focuses on building and maintaining search features that help customers discover products and recipes, including hybrid search (lexical + semantic/KNN) and relevance/ranking improvements.

Responsibilities

• Own the search service end-to-end: index design, query pipelines, relevance tuning, cluster health, scaling, and OpenSearch upgrades.
• Lead technical discussions on search architecture, hybrid retrieval strategies, embedding model selection, scoring/normalization pipelines, and personalization.
• Partner with engineering leads and product stakeholders to translate business requirements (e.g., new facets, dietary filtering, personalized ranking) into performant search features.
• Contribute across the search stack:
  • document mapping
  • query builders
  • function scoring
  • KNN vector search
  • text embeddings inference sidecar
• Use AI-powered dev tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate prototyping, code review, debugging, and documentation, and help establish team best practices.
• Raise the bar on engineering quality via code reviews, testing, technical presentations, and refactoring.
• Participate in interviewing and hiring decisions; provide mentoring/guidance to less experienced developers.

Requirements

• 5+ years of commercial software development experience.
• 3+ years hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, including:
  • index design
  • cluster management
  • Query DSL
• 2+ years experience with semantic/vector search techniques:
  • KNN
  • approximate nearest neighbor algorithms (e.g., HNSW)
  • embedding model work (implied by semantic search requirements)

Nice-to-haves

• Ability to independently execute projects, proactively raise issues, and unblock themselves.
• Strong mentoring skills and comfort debating solutions with evidence while staying open to changing approach.