Senior Search Engineer

Job Description

Zeals, a fast-growing tech company in Japan, is seeking a Senior Search Engineer to join their engineering team. Zeals aims to revolutionize hospitality on the Internet by unlocking digital customer service experiences through conversational commerce technology. The company has secured nearly $40 million in funding and is expanding into the US market.

The Senior Search Engineer will focus on building and optimizing search solutions that power Zeals' conversational commerce platform. He/She will design and implement search algorithms to improve the relevance, accuracy, and speed of chat interactions.

Role involves:

• Designing, developing, and optimizing search algorithms and infrastructure using technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, or Lucene.
• Integrating AI-powered models and machine learning to improve search relevance, speed, and accuracy.
• Collaborating with NLP and data science teams to integrate semantic search and language models.
• Building and maintaining high-performance indexing, ranking, and query processing systems.
• Tuning relevance metrics based on real-world data and continuously monitoring performance.
• Mentoring junior engineers, conducting code reviews, and participating in an on-call rotation.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience as a search engineer or in a directly related role.
• Strong background in search algorithms, information retrieval, and ranking systems.
• Expertise in search technologies like Elasticsearch, Solr, or Lucene.
• Proficiency in Python and/or Java for backend systems development.
• Familiarity with semantic search, NLP, or embedding-based retrieval.
• Proven ability to optimize query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across teams and communicate complex search concepts clearly.
• English proficiency is required.
• Conversational Japanese is a plus.

Role offers:

• Visa support for the right candidates.
• Highly flexible, remote-first organization (in Japan).
• Interim work from overseas.
• Housing allowance (within 1.5KM away from office).
• Club activity allowance.
• Team building allowance and Lunch allowance.
• Zeals Bar (bi-monthly free flow beer party).