Staff Software Engineer, Search

Join the future of news

We’re on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you’ll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most.

About Our Team

The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning Newsroom and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales.

Why This Role Matters

Arc XP, a cloud-based digital experience platform, is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the backend engineering team responsible for Arc's content retrieval system. Arc XP is the SaaS division of The Washington Post, and powers more than 2000 media sites across 27 countries, reaching more than 1.5 billion unique users. In this role, you will be responsible for architecting, designing, implementing, maintaining and ensuring that our our cloud-based APIs are efficient and profitable at scale. You will bring technical leadership in respect to our search infrastructure with expertise in OpenSearch, Elasticsearch or similar. You will also function as a leader in our Lean and Agile content platform group, collaborating across teams on performance, scalability, security, and cost goals.

Motivation

• You are inspired by having developers as your customers, finding motivation in the different and creative solutions they build on your platform.
• You welcome the challenge of working at scale, aiming to deliver consistent high-quality incremental improvements to customers regularly. Your philosophy is that a project isn't complete until it's shipped.
• You find satisfaction in getting to ground truth and using it to influence decisions.
• You thrive in a collaborative environment, exchanging technical insights with peers during code reviews and design discussions. You enjoy mentoring others, fostering growth, and sharing knowledge within the team.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement technical solutions that meet functional and non-functional requirements. Set a high bar for quality through automated testing, peer review, and observability technologies.
• Iteratively propose, design and deliver technical solutions that improve our KPIs and delight customers.
• Deliver value regularly by practicing Agile development. Support the development of a roadmap through refinement and estimation.
• Reduce ambiguity in technical direction by actively contributing ideas and insights, and seeking clarification through questions during technical deliberations.
• Fulfill our SLAs (service-level agreements) by participating in an on-call rotation, supporting the team in resolving incidents, producing RCAs, and implementing best practices.
• Earn customer trust by upholding security best practices and participating in Arc’s security processes.
• Set and improve engineering standards for Arc and participate in mentorship.

Qualifications

• BA/BS in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience working with search engines like OpenSearch/Elasticsearch in production environments.
• Deep understanding of OpenSearch architecture, including index management, query optimization, cluster configurations, and scalability.
• Expertise in designing scalable, fault-tolerant architectures for search platforms that handle large datasets and high query volumes.
• Expertise with one or more server-side programming languages, such as Node.js.
• Expertise designing, building, and analyzing scalable web applications, from the data layer to the gateway.
• Experience designing, building and troubleshooting multi-service applications in Amazon Web Services
• Experience with and enthusiasm for automated testing.
• English proficiency.

This is a fully remote position that operates on US EST hours and reports to the Engineering Lead for Content Retrieval. As a division of The Washington Post, we actively support remote work from select non-US countries. We currently have team members in Mexico, Colombia, and other parts of Latin America.

Your story awaits. Apply today!

Learn more about The Post at careers.washingtonpost.com.