Principal Engineer

Dovetail is the world’s leading AI-first customer insights hub, on a mission to improve the quality of every thing. We’re redefining what it means to be connected to your customer, giving everyone on the product team fast and easy access to customer insights at any point in the development lifecycle.

Founded in 2017, Dovetail’s team is 100+ and growing across our offices in Sydney and San Francisco. We’re seeking ambitious problem solvers from a diverse range of backgrounds, who are desired for their experience, passionate about their craft, and excited about the work we’re undertaking. If this sounds like you, read on…

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Ask team, focusing on building and scaling our world-class conversational search and insights generation features. The team has an extremely high impact and is faced with the challenge of building powerful search systems while providing simplicity to our customers.

We're all about sweating the details on delightful experiences, tackling ambitious technical challenges head-on, and constantly delivering customer value. As a Principal Engineer, you will be a critical part of guiding our teams in executing projects, being proactive in identifying architectural improvements to our search infrastructure, and playing a key role in defining and communicating our search technology strategy.

What you’ll do

• Collaborate with and support engineering teams. You can effectively build trust with engineers by having an empathetic, supportive approach to helping them with their biggest search challenges. You are an intent listener and seek first to understand these challenges. You don't just do the thing, you show others how it can be done.
• Define and communicate our search technology strategy. Working with our Technical Leadership, you will define Dovetail's vision for search and insights extraction, which complements our product vision. You are a constant advocate for this strategy and guide our technical leads to build robust search systems in service of your vision.
• Identify, prioritize and solve systemic technical challenges. You are in constant pursuit of improving our search architecture, especially challenges that cut across multiple teams. You proactively raise these issues and work closely with product leadership to explore solutions, determine priorities, and lead projects to solve them.
• Design and implement advanced search systems. You will architect and build scalable indexing pipelines, query understanding systems, and relevance tuning mechanisms that enable our customers to effortlessly extract insights from their data.
• Advocate for and maintain engineering quality. Dovetail takes great pride in the quality of the search experiences we deliver to our customers, and that starts with the standard that you set for our teams. You'll support team members in understanding performance expectations and find scalable ways to prevent issues in search accuracy, latency, and relevance.

What you’ll bring

• Extensive experience building search systems. You'll have hands-on exposure to designing and implementing search infrastructure using technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, or vector databases. You understand information retrieval fundamentals, query optimization, and relevance tuning. Experience with AI augmentation of search is highly valuable.
• Excellent communicator. You can easily convey your thoughts on complex search architectures with your product team and have the ability to articulate query performance vs. relevance tradeoffs. When required, you can also be a strong storyteller to get buy-in from other teams.
• Experience managing complex search infrastructure. You'll have the ability to design and deliver complex search features, optimize indexing pipelines, and provide reasonable performance estimates. You have worked on search projects with stakeholders across multiple teams and functional roles.
• You have experience teaching others. You have mentored junior team members to help them learn search best practices, information retrieval concepts, and improve their decision-making around search architecture.
• You are pragmatic and flexible. Like your new teammates, you're used to doing what's necessary to get the job done. You'll need to be comfortable with ambiguity in search requirements, be resourceful to solve retrieval problems, and be able to adjust to shifting customer search needs.
• When you do it, you nail it. You share our keen eye for quality. You don't half-ass your work, instead what you ship is top-notch. You cut scope before cutting quality. You are seen as someone who leads by setting a high bar for search excellence.

At Dovetail, we’re passionate about building and fostering an environment where every team member feels supported and valued. We celebrate individualism, welcoming everyone to show up as their authentic selves every day. It’s no secret that diversity builds the best teams, large or small, so we highly encourage applications from people who identify as part of an under-represented group.