Software Engineer (Contract) - Talent Matching & Search Systems

We're seeking a Software Engineer to support the development and maintenance of Greenhouse's web-based applications as part of an approximately 12-month engagement.

Core Responsibilities:

You'll contribute to Talent Matching, Talent Rediscovery, and related employer-facing experiences. Your work will focus on building product capabilities and the search and matching systems behind them, with a particular emphasis on OpenSearch or Elasticsearch and the practical applications of AI/ML to matching, ranking, and search relevance.

The role is collaborative and execution-focused, with the majority of your time spent in the codebase, building features, fixing bugs, and ensuring product stability and performance for users.

Key Areas of Focus:

• Talent Matching and Rediscovery Systems
• Search and Ranking Infrastructure (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch)
• AI/ML Applications for relevance tuning and matching
• Full-stack Development across backend systems, APIs, and modern frontend frameworks

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience writing production software
• Proficiency in Ruby, C#, Java, or Python, with a preference for Ruby on Rails
• Strong fundamentals in JavaScript or TypeScript, including React
• Full-stack experience covering backend systems, APIs, data modeling, and modern frontend development
• Production experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, including indexing, query design, relevance tuning, and performance optimization
• Experience building or working with search, ranking, recommendation, or matching systems
• Practical experience applying AI/ML techniques to production applications
• Collaboration experience with Product and Design teams in ambiguous, user-facing problem spaces
• Ability to develop clean, efficient, maintainable, and scalable production code
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical teams

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Ruby on Rails
• Advanced experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale
• Experience with semantic search, embeddings, ranking, recommendation, or matching systems
• Experience applying AI/ML capabilities to real-world production applications
• Experience building evaluation, observability, testing, and feedback mechanisms for search or matching systems
• Experience with analytical databases
• Experience working in product-focused engineering teams collaborating closely with Product, Design, Data, and ML
• Strong understanding of trade-offs between relevance, latency, reliability, infrastructure cost, and user experience
• Experience working in distributed or remote engineering environments