What do SafetyCulture Engineers do?

Our mission and your opportunity is to help solve the challenges faced in an increasingly distributed workforce. In short, to shape Engineering excellence, nurture emerging Engineering talent and build out an inclusive, high‑performing interdisciplinary team.

Role Overview

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll be empowered to manage complex architectural decisions and drive change. You'll own the delivery of practical solutions to solve real‑world problems for customers, with the knowledge that what you build has an immediate positive impact. For this role we specifically seek someone who has built large‑scale multi‑tenanted search systems.

Responsibilities

- Design, build and operate large‑scale search across front end and back end, in a stack of React, TypeScript, Golang, PostgreSQL and OpenSearch running on AWS.
- Own the search relevance and retrieval‑quality. Define how relevance is measured, then drive it up through ranking, query pipelines, and tuning.
- Lead search architecture: indexing strategy, hybrid retrieval (combining lexical text search with semantic/vector search), embeddings, and ranking, including the trade‑offs each involves.
- Build AI‑native applications, connecting retrieval to LLM‑powered experiences (e.g. RAG), and stay at the bleeding edge of agentic coding tools.
- Provide technical leadership guiding search architecture, execution, and cross‑functional collaboration to deliver impactful outcomes.
- Own search feature delivery end‑to‑end: breaking down requirements with stakeholders, partnering with Product and Design, supporting other engineers, and ensuring successful delivery.
- Articulate effort‑vs‑impact trade‑offs, including build‑vs‑buy decisions.
- Keep search operable at scale, performance, observability, and cost as data volume grows.
- Drive high‑performance team outcomes by setting rigorous engineering standards, mentoring peers,



and improving team practices for quality, velocity, and collaboration.
- Demonstrate SafetyCulture's values (Think Customer; Open, Honest, Always; Better as a Team; Be Bold, Bring Action).

Qualifications

- Deep search / information‑retrieval expertise: lexical text search (inverted indexes, BM25‑style ranking), semantic and vector search (embeddings, approximate nearest‑neighbour), hybrid retrieval, and relevance tuning.
- Hands‑on with RAG: chunking, retrieval pipelines, grounding model outputs, and evaluating retrieval quality.
- Proven track record building search capability into recent or existing applications that retrieve information at scale in a multi‑tenanted architecture.
- Strong OpenSearch / Elasticsearch operating experience at scale, including how segment merging works and the operational challenges that architecture presents.
- A systems thinker who decomposes large problems into small ones and teaches less experienced engineers to do the same.
- Works autonomously and is comfortable making the call without waiting on sign‑off; co‑owns technical and product direction rather than building to someone else's spec.
- Influences where the product goes, not just how it gets built.
- Thrives in a small team at a fast pace, comfortable with little formal process and structure.
- If you have used turbopuffer in production before, let us know!

Benefits

- Equity with high growth potential, and a competitive salary.
- Access to professional and personal training and development opportunities.
- Participation in hackathons, workshops, and lunch & learn sessions.
- Community involvement, open source work, attending talks and events, and experimenting with new technologies.

We’re committed to building inclusive teams and cultivating a sense of belonging so our people can bring their whole authentic selves to work each day. We seek to make reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process to create an even playing field for all candidates.

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📌 Senior/Staff Backend Engineer – Search (City of Sydney)
🏢 Safetyculture
📍 City of Sydney