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.
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're specifically looking for someone who has built large scale multi-tenanted search systems.
You'll face exciting technical challenges as we scale, and be an integral part of the engineering team. High-performing teams here own their services, and you're trusted to build and run a system that serves millions of users while transforming it into a system that will serve tens of millions of users in the near future. We empower engineers to learn new skills and use technology to solve customer problems, including initiatives in IoT, machine learning, and event-driven architecture.
This role is part of our Best Fit job match program. We have a variety of Software Engineering roles, by applying to this role will be considered for multiple roles across our engineering teams. We want to set you up for success in your role so we assess your capabilities and then match you up to the best team.
In this role you can expect to:
- 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).
You may be a great fit for this role if you have some of the following:
- 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 new 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!
What Do I Get Access To When Working at SafetyCulture?
- 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
Skills Required
- Experience building large-scale multi‑tenanted search systems
- Deep information retrieval expertise (inverted indexes, BM25-style ranking, relevance tuning)
- Experience with semantic and vector search, embeddings, and hybrid retrieval
- Operating OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale (including operational considerations like segment merging)
- Hands-on experience designing and running search on AWS
- Production experience with Go (Golang) and TypeScript/React and PostgreSQL
- Experience integrating retrieval with LLMs and building RAG-style pipelines
- Proven track record delivering search features end-to-end in production systems
- Systems thinking and ability to decompose large problems and mentor junior engineers
- Ability to make autonomous architectural decisions and influence product direction
- Experience with semantic retrieval evaluation and retrieval-quality measurement
- Familiarity with turbopuffer in production
What We Do
SafetyCulture is a global technology company that puts the power of continuous improvement into everyone's hands. Our operations platform unlocks the power of observation at scale, giving leaders visibility and workers a voice in driving quality, efficiency, and safety improvements. More than 60,000 customers use our operations platform to perform checks, train staff, report issues, and automate tasks. In doing so, we drive processes that help businesses get better every day. Recent analysis by Forrester found that our flagship products provide a 214% return on investment for customers, and USD $3.6M in cost savings from operational improvements. From top Australian ASX-listed grocer and retailer Coles and American aviation giant JetBlue, to Europe’s largest hospitality multi-national Accor, our operations platform is helping teams in every industry.
