Associate Director, Software Engineering - Search

Who we are:

SiriusXM and its brands (Pandora, SiriusXM Media, AdsWizz, Simplecast, and SiriusXM Connect) are leading a new era of audio entertainment and services by delivering the most compelling subscription and ad-supported audio entertainment experience for listeners -- in the car, at home, and anywhere on the go with connected devices. Our vision is to shape the future of audio, where everyone can be effortlessly connected to the voices, stories and music they love wherever they are.

This is the place where a diverse group of emerging talent and legends alike come to share authentic and purposeful songs, stories, sounds and insights through some of the best programming and technology in the world. Our critically-acclaimed, industry-leading audio entertainment encompasses music, sports, comedy, news, talk, live events, and podcasting. No matter their individual role, each of our employees plays a vital part in bringing SiriusXM’s vision to life every day.

SiriusXM is the leading audio entertainment company in North America, and the premier programmer and platform for subscription and digital advertising-supported audio products. SiriusXM’s platforms collectively reach approximately 150 million listeners, the largest digital audio audience across paid and free tiers in North America, and deliver music, sports, talk, news, comedy, entertainment and podcasts. Pandora, a subsidiary of SiriusXM, is the largest ad-supported audio entertainment streaming service in the U.S. SiriusXM's subsidiaries Simplecast and AdsWizz make it a leader in podcast hosting, production, distribution, analytics and monetization. The Company’s advertising sales organization, which operates as SiriusXM Media, leverages its scale, cross-platform sales organization and ad tech capabilities to deliver results for audio creators and advertisers. SiriusXM, through SiriusXM Canada Holdings, Inc., also offers satellite radio and audio entertainment in Canada. In addition to its audio entertainment businesses, SiriusXM offers connected vehicle services to automakers.

How you’ll make an impact:

We are looking for an Associate Director, Software Engineering to join the Content Services team within the Platform Services Engineering organization. The Content Services team is responsible for building high throughput, highly available services on SiriusXM’s service platform that are critical to the user experience. This service platform will power multiple SiriusXM consumer products that reach millions of users (Pandora, SXM Media, SiriusXM Connected Vehicle Services).

In this role, you will have the opportunity to be part of the team that’s reinventing the platform and infrastructure that millions of SiriusXM/Pandora subscribers use to search for relevant and personalized content -- thinking about everything from the experience to the system architecture supporting it. You will be involved in the design, rollout, and support of a highly performant, highly scalable and highly available search platform with your team. Code search, semantic search and AI are a complex, cutting edge problem space and you will help your senior team navigate uncertainty and make effective implementation tradeoff decisions, relying on careful reasoning and decision making around a significant infrastructure budget.

What you’ll do:

• Lead a group of highly collaborative Engineers.

• Work closely with Science/ML team, Data Engineers, Data Analytics teams to stay on top of Search roadmap and deliverables.

• Innovate to build performant solutions that continue to scale to the increasing demands of the business. Turning solutions into architecture diagrams and tech briefs when necessary.

• Contribute to a healthy engineering culture and drive best practices.

• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions.

• Strive to develop simple solutions to complex problems.

• Ensure team-wide code quality through code reviews and PR feedback.

• Exhibit accountability at both a personal and team level.

• Author and provide feedback on technical proposals and root cause analyses.

• Help research and recommend new technologies to solve strategic issues.

What you’ll need:

• 7+ years of professional experience, including 3+ years of management experience.

• Expertise in Scala and functional programming paradigms.

• Good understanding of search engine algorithms and ranking factors ex Lexical Search, Semantic Search.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills to identify SEO issues and provide effective solutions.

• Good to have Search Engine experience such as Elasticsearch, Open Search, Solr.

• Experience designing and implementing RESTful web APIs in an enterprise setting.

• Deep understanding of the software development lifecycle, including the use of source control, CI/CD, and various testing approaches.

• Deep distributed systems knowledge, having supported multiple high-throughput systems in a production setting.

• Experience with AWS in a production setting, preferably having leveraged offerings for compute, databases, storage, containers and serverless technologies.

• Experience with asynchronous programming models, ideally those that support high-throughput systems running on the JVM in a production setting.

• Pragmatic approach to weighing engineering tradeoffs versus business needs.

• Persistent sense of curiosity to understand why something is and needs to be.

• Accountability and a sense of extreme ownership that doesn’t end after the system is deployed to production.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

• Must have legal right to work in the U.S.

At SiriusXM, we carefully consider a wide range of factors when determining compensation, including your background and experience. These considerations can cause your compensation to vary. We expect the base salary for this position to be in the range of $153,500 to $220,000 and will depend on your skills, qualifications, and experience. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives. We encourage all interested candidates to apply.

Our goal at SiriusXM is to provide and maintain a work environment that fosters mutual respect, professionalism and cooperation. SiriusXM is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, alienage or citizenship status, age, disability or handicap, sex, gender identity, marital status, familial status, veteran status, sexual orientation or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws.

The requirements and duties described above may be modified or waived by the Company in its sole discretion without notice.