Search Engineer

Your work days are brighter here.

At Workday, it all began with a conversation over breakfast. When our founders met at a sunny California diner, they came up with an idea to revolutionize the enterprise software market. And when we began to rise, one thing that really set us apart was our culture. A culture which was driven by our value of putting our people first. And ever since, the happiness, development, and contribution of every Workmate is central to who we are. Our Workmates believe a healthy employee-centric, collaborative culture is the essential mix of ingredients for success in business. That’s why we look after our people, communities and the planet while still being profitable. Feel encouraged to shine, however that manifests: you don’t need to hide who you are. You can feel the energy and the passion, it's what makes us unique. Inspired to make a brighter work day for all and transform with us to the next stage of our growth journey? Bring your brightest version of you and have a brighter work day here.

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About the Team

The vision of our Business Technology Organization is to be the trusted partner that fuels Workday's business technology innovations and products to enable company growth at scale.

Our team cultivates relationships with built on collaboration and trust to support a rapidly growing business. We strive to improve efficiency and operational effectiveness through technology, innovation and inspiration.

About the Role

Data Ingestion & Indexing:

• Building Data Pipelines: Developing and maintaining ETL/ELT (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines to ingest data from various sources into the search index.

• Data Transformation: Implementing logic to clean, normalize, enrich, and transform raw data into a format suitable for efficient indexing and searching.

• Indexing Strategy: Defining and optimizing the indexing process, including schema design, field mappings, tokenization, stemming, and other text analysis techniques to ensure relevant and accurate retrieval.

Query Processing & Relevance:

• Query Understanding: Developing and enhancing mechanisms to interpret user queries effectively, including spell correction, autocomplete, synonym expansion, query intent recognition, and natural language understanding (NLU).

• Personalization: Implementing features to personalize search results based on individual user history, preferences, and context.

• Experimentation (A/B Testing): Designing and conducting A/B tests to evaluate the impact of changes to ranking algorithms, query understanding, or other search features on user engagement and key metrics.

Monitoring, Maintenance & Troubleshooting:

• System Monitoring: Setting up and managing monitoring, alerting, and logging for the search platform to ensure its health, performance, and stability.

• Troubleshooting: Diagnosing and resolving complex issues related to search performance, data consistency, indexing failures, and query errors.

• Maintenance: Performing regular maintenance tasks, including index re-building, software upgrades, and capacity planning.

• On-Call Support: Participating in on-call rotations to respond to critical production issues.

Collaboration & Iteration:

• Cross-functional Collaboration: Working closely with product managers to understand user needs and translate them into technical requirements. Collaborating with data scientists on advanced ranking models and AI/ML integration, and with front-end developers on user experience.

• Feedback Integration: Continuously gathering feedback from users and stakeholders to identify areas for improvement and guide future development.

• Stay Updated: Keeping abreast of the latest advancements in information retrieval, machine learning, and search technologies to bring innovative solutions to the platform.

About You

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years in Enterprise Software Application Development

• Bachelor’s or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field

• Programming Skills: Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language commonly used for backend and data processing (e.g., Python, Java, Go, or C++)

• Data Structures & Algorithms: Solid understanding of fundamental data structures (e.g., arrays, lists, hash tables, trees) and algorithms (e.g., sorting, searching). This is crucial for efficient data handling.

• Systems Thinking: Basic understanding of how software systems interact, including APIs, databases, and distributed concepts

• Version Control: Experience with Git and standard version control practices

• Problem-Solving: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to debug and fix code

• Eagerness to Learn: A genuine interest in information retrieval, search technologies, and continuous learning

Our Approach to Flexible Work
 

With Flex Work, we’re combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in-office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you'll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote "home office" roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.

Are you being referred to one of our roles? If so, ask your connection at Workday about our Employee Referral process!