Sr Software Engineer - Search & Recommendations, Java/Typescript-Austin, TX

Responsibilities

Job Summary: As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll work with the Search and Recommendations team.Our team is responsible for the search and recommendation experiences that power product discovery across H-E-B Digital. We help millions of Texans find the products they need through intelligent search, personalization, ranking and recommendation systems. You'll work on complex engineering challenges involving relevance, query understanding, experimentation and AI-driven experiences at grocery scale.

Location: Austin (On-site)

Key Responsibilities & Essential Functions:

• Works on technology projects / tasks with limited or no guidance
• Writes production-ready code and tests that meet acceptance criteria, are easily testable, documented, easily understood by other developers, and account for edge cases, security, and errors.
• Creating, configuring, and supporting build and deployment pipelines.
• Leads others in coding / configuration / maintaining / testing / debugging existing or new systems; delivers quality features and bug fixes that align with our development process
• Capable of leading team on effective production support or on-call, debugging, and troubleshooting highly complex issues within team services. Able to identify a path to resolution for most issues for team services.
• Demonstrates ownership of team services and influences the team. Starts to learn how to influence across teams. Fosters growth environment through mentorship and open collaboration with peers.
• Recommends and drives changes to processes and tools at the team level aligned with the organization and company goals.
• Reviews epics critically and ensures dependencies are identified, they're appropriately broken down and prioritized, and well understood by the team and stakeholders.
• Drives priority setting and urgency in alignment with organizational strategy.
• Anticipates and communicates blockers, delays, and cost ballooning for their work before they require escalation. Ensures expectations within their team are clarified between all parties involved.
• Leads team ceremonies and larger team efforts.
• Drives improvements within assigned team.
• Expert knowledge in their area of focus and mentors' others
• Fosters a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing within their team and with their team's business stakeholders.
• Leads root cause analysis and establishing action items for the RCA.
• Learns to work with other teams to resolve issues involving dependent services. Identifies and communicates cross-team dependencies.
• Ensures system monitoring for team services is effective and adheres to best practices.

The responsibilities and essential functions outlined above describe the general nature and level of work assigned to this position. This is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, and skills required. Duties and responsibilities may be modified at any time based on business needs. Employees may be required to perform other job-related tasks as requested by their supervisor, subject to reasonable accommodations.

Qualifications & Key Requirements:

Work Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Experience building and evolving search, retrieval, ranking and recommendation capabilities that help customers discover products more effectively, leveraging AI-driven experiences to deliver relevant, personalized results at scale.
• Strong experience developing backend services with Java
• Experience building APIs and microservices using TypeScript and Node.js
• Experience designing and supporting GraphQL APIs
• Experience building cloud-native applications in AWS
• Experience with infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform
• Experience with search technologies such as OpenSearch or Elasticsearch
• Experience working with NoSQL databases, including DynamoDB
• Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming platforms such as Kafka or Kinesis
• Strong understanding of software design, system architecture and distributed systems
• Experience working in Agile environments and modern CI/CD practices
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and integrating AI assistants into the software development lifecycle

Knowledge/Skills/Abilities:

• Advanced knowledge in system and data architecture, data modeling, and design and capable of architecting and designing at the application or service level using well-accepted design patterns
• Able to review platform designs for strength of engineering solutions, namely performance, sustainability, and iterative development potential.
• Comprehensive knowledge of Computer Science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, design patterns, system architecture and design patterns
• Advanced understanding of development methodologies and processes
• Proficient at analyzing memory and performance issues using profiling tools.
• Adjust - Leverages Agile metrics to improve team performance and deliverables. Evaluates and adjusts resources, self, and team as necessary.
• Collaborate - Ability to work on tasks which span multiple domains, requiring cross-team collaboration, which have a high impact on your project.
• Agility - Embraces risk, change, and helps team manage ambiguity within the team's scope of work.
• Able to drive progress without having a complete picture and can articulate potential tradeoffs and prioritize when faced with ambiguity.
• Connect - Delivers clear, concise, effective messages across different levels; can tailor communication based on intended audience.
• Growth Mindset - Fosters a culture of mentoring and coaching across multiple technical teams and other stakeholders.
• Relate - Fosters a culture within their team where people are encouraged to share their opinions and contribute to discussions in a respectful manner, approach disagreement non-defensively with inquisitiveness, and use contradictory opinions as a basis for constructive, productive conversations.

Physical Demands & Working Conditions:

• Travel by car or plane with overnight stays
• Work extended hours; sit for extended periods
• Work rotating and on-call schedules, as needed

JDENGINEERING