Senior Software Engineer, Search Relevance

The Role: 

The Senior Software Engineer, Search Relevance will work on improving the Newsela search engine to delight our teacher and students, who use search as a primary way of finding content for their educational needs. You will contribute to team efforts around relevance and bring your own ideas and experiments to the search relevance team. Additionally, you will come up with your ideas and experiments to test.You will also make changes to Search infrastructure including the ability to monitor Elasticsearch and Agatha performance. You will ideate and bring up mechanisms to reduce latency by 50 ms and/or cut the costs of spinning a search experiment by 30%. You will partner closely with data scientists, product managers, other engineers on our frontend and backend teams to bring cutting edge techniques to improve search, which is used by more than 70% of our user base to discover engaging content.

Who we are:

As a member of our growing Content Discovery team, you will have the opportunity to join a team that is building the evolution of our next-generation search engine: semantic search, which is a major way for teachers and students to find content. You’ll also have the opportunity to join a fun team culture with virtual get-togethers and events.You will have a direct impact on our company's big rock. A lot of teachers use our discovery surfaces as a gateway to what to teach, which will ultimately scale Newsela’s ability to bring engaging, culturally responsive learning content to K-12 classrooms nationwide.

Who you are: 

You have 3+ years of experience in Python, Data Structures, and Data Experimentation efforts.You have demonstrated success in improving Search Relevance by launching features and experiments with SOLR/Elasticsearch, NLP, offline eval, tuning, and text-analysis, etc.You are able to leverage your ability to work on Backend and/or Search infra to effectively design and build a high-level system for performance, scalability, latency, and launching metrics.You are someone who can put on a product hat, think on behalf of users, and propose features. Be able to act as a thought partner to our product managers and challenge their assumptions.You have a background working with ML Ops and you have the ability to design and productionize such a system.

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.