Senior Software Engineer (Search / Retrieval)
Location: Palo Alto, California
Department: Product & Engineering
About Workato
Workato transforms technology complexity into business opportunity. As the leader in enterprise orchestration, Workato helps businesses globally streamline operations by connecting data, processes, applications, and experiences. Its AI-powered platform enables teams to navigate complex workflows in real-time, driving efficiency and agility.
Trusted by a community of 400,000 global customers, Workato empowers organizations of every size to unlock new value and lead in today’s fast-changing world. Learn how Workato helps businesses of all sizes achieve more at workato.com.
Why join us?
Ultimately, Workato believes in fostering a flexible, trust-oriented culture that empowers everyone to take full ownership of their roles. We are driven by innovation and looking for team players who want to actively build our company.
But, we also believe in balancing productivity with self-care. That’s why we offer all of our employees a vibrant and dynamic work environment along with a multitude of benefits they can enjoy inside and outside of their work lives.
If this sounds right up your alley, please submit an application. We look forward to getting to know you!
Also, feel free to check out why:
-
Business Insider named us an “enterprise startup to bet your career on”
-
Forbes’ Cloud 100 recognized us as one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world
-
Deloitte Tech Fast 500 ranked us as the 17th fastest growing tech company in the Bay Area, and 96th in North America
-
Quartz ranked us the #1 best company for remote workers
Responsibilities
We are looking for an exceptional Senior Software Engineer (Search / Retrieval) to join our growing team. In this role, you will lead the design, development, and optimization of intelligent search systems that leverage machine learning at their core. You’ll be responsible for building end-to-end retrieval pipelines that incorporate advanced techniques in query understanding, ranking, and entity recognition. The ideal candidate combines deep expertise in information retrieval and search relevance with hands-on experience applying machine learning to real-world search problems at scale. You will also be responsible to:
-
Lead the development of advanced our search cluster that can scale to millions of documents across customers and data sources
-
Deploy learning-to-rank models that optimize relevance using behavioral signals, embeddings, and structured feedback.
-
Build and scale robust Entity Recognition pipelines that enhance document understanding, enable contextual disambiguation, and support entity-aware retrieval.
-
Architect next-gen search infrastructure capable of supporting highly dynamic document corpora and real-time indexing.
-
Drive improvements in query construction, indexing and search performance
-
Be up-to-date with the latest improvements in search and indexing technologies
-
Collaborate with product and applied research teams to translate user needs into data-informed search innovations
-
Produce clean, scalable code and influence system architecture and roadmap across the relevance and platform stack.
Requirements
Qualifications / Experience / Technical Skills
-
Bachelors/Masters/PhD degree in Statistics, Mathematics or Computer Science, or another quantitative field.
-
7+ years of backend engineering experience with 3+ years in search, information retrieval, or related fields
-
Strong proficiency in Python
-
Hands-on experience with search engines (Opensearch or Elasticsearch)
-
Strong understanding of information retrieval concepts spanning traditional methods (TF-IDF, BM25) and modern neural search techniques (vector embeddings, transformer models)
-
Experience with text processing, NLP, and relevance tuning
-
Experience with relevance evaluation metrics (NDCG, MRR, MAP)
-
Experience with large-scale distributed systems
-
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
Soft Skills / Personal Characteristics
-
Strong communication abilities to explain technical concepts
-
Collaborative mindset for cross-functional team work
-
Detail-oriented with strong focus on quality
-
Self-motivated and able to work independently
-
Passion for solving complex search problems
(REQ ID: 2272)
There are more than 50,000 engineering jobs:
Subscribe to membership and unlock all jobs
Engineering Jobs
60,000+ jobs from 4,500+ well-funded companies
Updated Daily
New jobs are added every day as companies post them
Refined Search
Use filters like skill, location, etc to narrow results
Become a member
🥳🥳🥳 452 happy customers and counting...
Overall, over 80% of customers chose to renew their subscriptions after the initial sign-up.
To try it out
For active job seekers
For those who are passive looking
Cancel anytime
Frequently Asked Questions
- We prioritize job seekers as our customers, unlike bigger job sites, by charging a small fee to provide them with curated access to the best companies and up-to-date jobs. This focus allows us to deliver a more personalized and effective job search experience.
- We've got over 200,000 jobs from 15,000+ vetted companies. No fake or sleazy jobs here!
- We aggregate jobs from 15,000+ companies' career pages, so you can be sure that you're getting the most up-to-date and relevant jobs.
- We're the only job board *for* software engineers, *by* software engineers… in case you needed a reminder! We add thousands of new jobs daily and offer powerful search filters just for you. 🛠️
- Every single hour! We add 2,000-3,000 new jobs daily, so you'll always have fresh opportunities. 🚀
- Typically, job searches take 3-6 months. EchoJobs helps you spend more time applying and less time hunting. 🎯
- Check daily! We're always updating with new jobs. Set up job alerts for even quicker access. 📅
What Fellow Engineers Say