Staff Software Engineer, Search

Job Description:

Our Technology team drives the evolution of our Engineering, Data, Product and User Experience functions. With a keen focus on delivering cutting-edge solutions, we shape the digital landscape for our customers, readers and users. From revolutionizing visuals to optimizing tools and harnessing the power of data, mobile, video and social platforms, our team is committed to providing a seamless and immersive experience across all touchpoints. Collaborating closely with our newsrooms and strategic partners, we spearhead the development of groundbreaking products and technologies.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Search team in Barcelona. You will design and build the search APIs, semantic and lexical search systems that connect millions of users with the most relevant content across our digital products. 

You will serve as a technical lead for the Search team, setting engineering direction, driving architectural decisions and mentoring engineers. You will partner closely with Product and Brand stakeholders to continuously improve the search experience for our users. The ideal candidate is comfortable embracing AI-assisted development — leveraging tools such as Claude Code and other coding agents to accelerate delivery and raise the quality bar across the team. 

• Design, build, and operate Search APIs and semantic search systems that deliver highly relevant content to millions of users in real time.

• Lead the development of semantic retrieval and ranking pipelines, including embedding generation, vector indexing, and relevance tuning.

• Act as technical lead for the Search team — driving architecture decisions, authoring technical design documents, and setting engineering standards.

• Collaborate with Product Managers and Brand partners to understand search quality goals, translate them into engineering initiatives and measure their impact.

• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through code reviews, pair programming and technical guidance, fostering a culture of continuous learning.

• Champion the use of AI coding agents (Claude Code and similar tools) to accelerate development velocity and improve code quality across the team.

• Manage and evolve infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and Chef, and maintain CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins.

• Containerise and deploy services using Docker and Kubernetes, ensuring efficient resource utilisation, high availability and smooth releases.

• Own reliability and observability of Search services — define SLOs, build dashboards, and lead incident response and post-mortems.

• Demonstrate knowledge of industry trends, technologies and tools, and drive improvements to engineering processes and developer experience across the team.

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.

• Experience designing and scaling search or information retrieval systems, including familiarity with semantic search, embeddings and vector databases.

• Experience implementing RESTful APIs following industry standards.

• Experience implementing, testing, deploying, troubleshooting and supporting multi-region, multi-environment systems with CI/CD, high availability and disaster recovery.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Chef) and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins).

• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes for containerised deployments in production environments.

• Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or senior individual contributor, owning architecture and guiding engineering teams.

• Experience collaborating with product managers and brand stakeholders to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions.

• Comfort adopting AI-assisted development workflows.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field is preferred.