Staff Engineer – Search
Skilled in Search tech? Come join us!
We have a fantastic opportunity for a Staff Engineer with a strong Search technology (semantic search, AI) background to join our team. You’ll be the lead engineer for our search mission and play a pivotal role in developing and optimising our match platform. We are on a mission to be the trusted foundation of every home. Making home improvements easy and hassle free is a big part of that. You’ll help us make the right matches through brilliant search functionality! You’ll join us at an exciting time with top-leadership team on board and an exciting five-year plan that will see us growing ten-fold. If are skilled in search tech and excited to build great products with brilliant people, we’d love to hear from you. We are Checkatrade. Are you?
Location: London or Portsmouth. Hybrid working applies. 3 days minimum in the office.
Where do you fit in?
You’ll report to the Engineering Manager and work closely with product managers, designers, data scientist, taxonomists and engineers to understand business requirements. You’ll get to translate them into technical solutions wearing your solutions architect hat to build scalable solutions that enhance our search catalogue. You’ll lead the development and optimisation of our match platform, focussing on improving search relevance, accuracy and efficiencies. We are customer obsessed and all about building best in class experiences for both our consumers and trades. You’ll help us deliver this through researching, evaluating, and implementing advanced search techniques, such as semantic search, to enable more intuitive and personalised search experiences. We are on an exciting growth journey; you’ll help us get there by collaboration with our monetisation team to identify opportunities for revenue generation within the search platform. This includes implement innovative monetisation strategies, such as sponsored listings and targeted advertising. You’ll also design and implement robust data pipelines, CDPs, and analytics frameworks to gather insights into user behaviours and search patters. We love data informed decision, so will you! Finally, as an experienced Staff Engineer with a robust technical skill set, you love mentoring and coaching junior engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional development within the team. Let’s get it done – together! All in?
We are an equal opportunities employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
What’s in it for you?
- A fantastic opportunity to work on the latest tech in a modern tech business with impressive growth plans and the investment to do so!
- A passionate business with a community of engineering, data and product talent around you. Opportunities to be bold, to innovate and to create products that transform lives and livelihoods!
- A transformational opportunity. We are digitising a largely offline sector. You could be part of making home improvements easy.
- An excellent benefits package, including a bonus scheme, an electrical vehicle salary sacrifice scheme, private medical plus much more.
What do you need to succeed?
- You’ll be skilled Staff/ Senior/ Lead Software engineer with a focus on search technology and information retrieval systems. This includes a strong track record of designing and implementing complex, scalable search solutions in a production environment, working with data science teams.
- Technical skills across PERN stack i.e. PostgreSQL, Express, React, and Node.js; with search frameworks like Elasticsearch or Solr will be highly desirable.
- Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and database systems.
- Experience with cloud computing platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure) and containerisation technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
- You’ll have strong comms skills and enjoy collaboration with cross-functional teams.
- We have a bias toward taking action. So will you!