Principal Software Engineer, Search Relevance

The Role:

In this role you’ll drive high-level technology decisions as well as day-to-day development on the team that’s building the search engine for Newsela’s growing variety of educational content. As the authority on relevance engineering across the organization, you’ll focus on deeply understanding the pedagogical needs of teachers and students, building a reliable infrastructure for tracking and evaluating search relevance metrics, creating a technical plan for how to pursue relevance improvements, and leading a team of software developers in the execution of the search development roadmap.

Why You’ll Love This Role:

Reporting to our Director of Systems Development, you’ll work closely with our Data Science and Content teams to help shape the future of K-12 education to deliver content at the just-right reading level. Using cutting edge techniques to improve search result quality, your work will directly impact our platform’s ability to serve the content teachers and students are looking for, and enable discovery of engaging, relevant content that further enriches the learning experience in K-12 classrooms nationwide. And because we're a technology company focused on improving the way students learn, you’ll be part of an engineering culture that values teaching, learning, and questioning.

Why We’ll Love You:

You have experience building and improving search systems (ElasticSearch, Solr), and competency in our tech stack (Python). You also understand web service architecture well enough to diagnose performance bottlenecks and propose a variety of remedies. Not only do you bring a passion for data science, but you're intensely curious and humble in the face of new information. You naturally seek out creative ways of measuring success, and meet contradictions in the data with the excitement of someone who knows they’re about to learn something new, not the resignation of someone who’s worried about being wrong.

You know how to find a shared language between product managers, data scientists, and software developers. You balance your engineering expertise with a product mindset, always digging for the underlying user and system needs, rather than simply settling for surface-level “requirements.” Your passion for complex technical problems is matched by your excitement to lead a team through large, multi-faceted technical projects. You can seamlessly distinguish and delegate responsibilities, set success criteria for projects, and coach teammates with a high level of organizational awareness to ensure each team member is growing and developing professionally.

About Newsela:

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.