Updated SSE 17/06/2026
Hybrid · London, England, United Kingdom
Job Summary
Senior Search Engineer to own and evolve 9fin's search platform (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch) and shape the system's indexing, searching, and serving. You will design tooling and APIs that internal teams rely on, define the technical roadmap for search and retrieval to support expanding AI capabilities, and mentor engineers while setting architecture and engineering standards. The role emphasizes production ownership, performance/reliability at scale, collaboration with product and data teams, and delivering self-service capabilities for non-search engineers. Stack includes Python (Flask & FastAPI), AWS, and Elastic Cloud, with a focus on scalable, reusable search infrastructure and operational tooling.
Required Qualifications
- Production ownership of a search platform built on Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or a closely related technology (Solr, Vespa, Lucene)
- Experience designing and building search infrastructure — data pipelines, APIs, and operational tooling
- Ability to build for other engineers with tooling, APIs, or platform capabilities
- Strong collaboration across teams and the ability to translate needs into search platform capabilities
- Experience with cloud-managed search deployments (Elastic Cloud / AWS)
- Exposure to AI/ML integration with search (vector search, hybrid retrieval, or RAG pipelines)
- Experience with Python and modern web frameworks (FastAPI, Pydantic)
- Understanding of distributed systems concepts (consistency, partitioning, replication)
- Ability to ship with confidence via internal developer platform and feature flags
Desired Qualifications
- Production ownership of a search platform built on Elasticsearch/OpenSearch/Solr/Lucene
- Experience designing and building search infrastructure (data pipelines, APIs, tooling)
- Ability to build for other engineers (tooling/APIs/platform capabilities)
- Strong collaboration across teams (product managers, data engineers, other engineering teams)
- Mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, contribute to architectural discussions
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