Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search Experience

About us

At Udemy, we’re on a mission to transform lives through learning. Through our intelligent skills platform and a global community of instructors, we’ve helped over 70 million learners and 16,000 organizations achieve their goals. Come join us in ensuring everyone, everywhere has access to the skills they need to unlock their potential and create possibilities for themselves and others.

This hybrid position requires two days per week in the office at the nearest hub. 

About you 

You’re an analytical problem-solver ready to put your skills toward purposeful work that has a global impact. You want to lead the way in innovation, exploring the latest technologies and finding new solutions. You thrive in a collaborative environment and are eager to work with and learn alongside the best in Product, Design, and Engineering.

About your skills

• Strong Communication Skills: You excel in articulating complex technical concepts clearly and concisely to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, fostering a collaborative and transparent work environment.
• Leadership and Mentorship Abilities: You have a track record of inspiring and empowering team members, providing guidance and mentorship to junior engineers, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth within the team.
• Adaptability and Learning Agility: You thrive in dynamic environments, quickly adapting to new technologies, methodologies, and challenges. Your eagerness to learn and ability to pivot effectively contribute to the team's success in a rapidly evolving industry.
• Problem-Solving and Critical Thinking: You approach challenges with a logical and analytical mindset, systematically analyzing problems, identifying root causes, and devising innovative solutions that address both short-term needs and long-term objectives.

About this role 

The Search Engineering team at Udemy is responsible for delivering a seamless and innovative discovery experience for learners. By incorporating data-driven decision-making (A/B testing), Machine Learning (ML), and Large Language Models (LLMs), we aim to improve our search platform and integrate advanced AI capabilities. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will play a key role in optimizing and maintaining microservices to handle high traffic and support integration with sophisticated ML and generative AI solutions. You’ll collaborate closely with data scientists, ML engineers, and product managers to drive the roadmap and enhance the value delivered to our learners.

What you'll be doing

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable microservice architectures that handle high traffic volumes in cloud environments.
• Apply integration patterns to support various frontend clients (e.g., GraphQL), microservices owned by other teams, and advanced ML/LLM algorithms. 
• Design, implement and manage search indexing solutions, including full-text search and semantic search using vector indices.
• Solve challenging, complex, high-impact technical challenges, continually refactor for robustness, performance, and scalability.
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of user-facing features, actively participating in agile processes for sprint planning and delivering within two-week cycles.
• Cultivate a team culture that prioritizes quality, scalability, and innovation in backend development.
• Mentor junior engineers, providing guidance in backend technologies best practices, architectural decisions and development strategies.

What you’ll have

• 8+ years of hands-on professional software development experience with a strong focus on backend technologies and a proven ability to design and implement scalable, reliable systems.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend programming languages such as Kotlin, Java or Python, with a focus on writing clean, maintainable, and well-documented code.
• Proficiency and hands-on experience with microservices architecture, including the design and implementation of microservices-based solutions.
• Experience with cloud platforms, particularly AWS, and hands-on experience with cloud services for scalable and resilient backend solutions.
• Understanding of containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) for deploying and managing containerized applications at scale.
• Experience with data streaming technologies like Kafka for real-time data processing.
• Experience with NoSQL databases and caching solutions such as Redis and DynamoDB for optimizing data access.
• Experience with gRPC, a high-performance, open-source framework for remote procedure call (RPC) communication. Familiarity with its implementation for efficient and scalable communication between microservices.
• Experience in designing, implementing, and maintaining RESTful and GraphQL APIs. 
• Experience optimizing code for performance and efficiency.
• Proven track record in debugging and troubleshooting complex technical issues in a live production environment.
• A passion for continuous learning and staying updated on emerging trends in machine learning, backend engineering, and search technologies.

We understand that not everyone will match each of the above qualifications. However, we also realize that everyone has unique experiences that can add value to our company. Even if you think your background might not perfectly align, we'd love to hear from you!

Life at Udemy

We aspire to be as vibrant and dynamic as the communities we serve, as inquisitive as those who use our platform, and as revolutionary as the future we strive to open for everyone. Here are some of the things we love about life at Udemy:

• We’re invested in creating an inclusive environment that welcomes a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. From creating employee resource groups, ensuring we’re a Fair Pay Workplace, and building a flexible work culture, our belonging, equity, diversity, and inclusion (BEDI) initiatives always put our people first. We want you to be able to bring your authentic self to work because when we all do, we’re better for it.

• Learning is what we do – inside and out. Our Learning & Development team is second to none, helping ensure your journey is one of continuous progression. You’ll also have unlimited access to Udemy courses, monthly UDays (meeting-free professional development days), and a generous annual professional development stipend.

• Our reason to exist is to revolutionize learning – that calls for taking risks and learning from failures. Whether it’s our hackathons (a company-wide effort to envision new possibilities for our product) or sharing our prototypes, we see experimentation as a crucial step on the path to success.

• We’re committed to creating world-class employee experiences and are proud of the recognition of this by Great Place to Work. 

Of course, the best thing about being part of Udemy is knowing your work makes a difference for people and organizations around the world. You’ve got the skills; why not use them to help others develop theirs?

At Udemy, we value diversity and inclusion and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition, or disability. 

Our Benefits Start With U

Our benefits package at Udemy “starts with U” and is grounded in mission-driven benefits that intentionally align with our core values. Here’s a sneak peek at just a few highlighted benefits if you’re a full-time Udemate based in the Türkiye:

• Core Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, life and income protection coverage

• Parental Benefits: Financial assistance for fertility (including egg-freezing), adoption, and surrogacy expenses; twelve weeks of paid family bonding for birth, surrogacy, adoption, and foster placement. 16 weeks paid maternity leave for birthing parents as well as a two-week “ease-back” program that enables parents to return part-time at full pay

• Whole U: Fully paid memberships for meditation/mindfulness, therapy/coaching visits, financial planning, fertility and family building, maternity and newborn care, parenting and pediatrics, menopause care, breastmilk shipping, and caregiving support

• Learning: Free access to Udemy and Udemy Business plus a yearly stipend to spend on professional development

• Holidays: 15 days of approved leave if the length of service is 2 months in the first year; 21 days of annual leave if the length of term is between 1 and 3 years; 26 days of annual leave if the length of term is more than 3 years (i.e. 26 days for every year after the end of 4 years of service)

Information regarding data privacy is available within the Udemy Careers Privacy Notice.

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