Description
Senior/Staff Backend Product Engineer - 3P Search Team
About the Team
The 3P Search team is at the forefront of a strategic initiative to transform enterprise knowledge retrieval and collaboration. Our core mission is to establish Slack as the singular gateway to a company's collective knowledge by providing a unified, AI-powered search experience. We are responsible for building the cutting-edge Enterprise Search feature, ensuring users can find anything—from conversations in Slack to data within connected third-party applications—all from a single, intuitive search bar.
As a central pillar driving this intelligence initiative, we play a pivotal role in ensuring that critical data and insights from platforms like Salesforce, Google Drive, Jira, and GitHub are instantly and intelligently searchable. Our work establishes Slack’s search bar as the primary interface for leveraging the power of structured data and our emerging Agentic AI experience.
We are a team of product engineers who deeply care about the user experience. We are seeking product-driven backend engineers with strong intuition and experience who build systems and design APIs with the end user in mind.
The Opportunity
We are looking for Senior and Staff level engineers to join the team. As a Senior or Staff Backend Product Engineer, you will be instrumental in designing, building, and owning the systems and APIs that directly shape Slack’s product experience. You will ensure these systems are scalable, highly performant, and precisely tailored to real user needs, all while making smart trade-offs between speed, cost, and user experience. If you are a collaborative engineer who understands that simplicity and reliability are carefully calculated aspects of system design, this is the role for you.
What You Will Be Doing
Conceptualize and Build: Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Designers, and other Backend/Frontend Engineers to brainstorm, conceptualize, and build new, high-impact features for our large and growing user base.
Deliver High-Quality Results: Contribute heavily to team projects that have a significant, measurable impact on the business and the user experience.
System Ownership: Actively own team features or core systems, defining their long-term health and roadmap while improving the health of surrounding integration systems.
Operational Excellence: Assist our skilled support and operations teams in triaging and resolving complex production issues.
Mentorship and Standards: Mentor other engineers, provide thoughtful and deep code reviews, and drive improvements in engineering standards, tooling, and processes across the team.
What You Should Have
A related technical degree (e.g., Computer Science, Engineering, etc.) is required.
7+ years of professional experience building and shipping web applications.
Proven experience with functional or imperative programming languages (e.g., PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, Go, or C). Expertise in our stack—PHP/Hack, Java, MySQL, and Linux—is a strong plus, but general familiarity with other common web languages and relational databases is a fine substitute.
The ability to significantly contribute to technical architecture discussions and drive critical technical decisions within your team.
A track record of writing understandable, testable code with a strong focus on maintainability.
Solid computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, programming languages, distributed systems, and information retrieval.
Strong Communication Skills: You can clearly explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, including designers, support, and product managers.
For roles in San Francisco and Los Angeles: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
