Senior Software Engineer, Search & AI

About this role

Muck Rack is the leading SaaS platform for public relations and communications professionals. Our mission is to enable organizations to build trust, tell their stories, and demonstrate the unique value of earned media. Muck Rack’s AI-powered, comprehensive, and integrated platform streamlines the PR workflow to help businesses generate positive media coverage, monitor mentions to manage brand reputation, and analyze PR’s impact on business outcomes.

By combining media database, monitoring, and reporting into one dynamic platform, we empower teams to collaborate seamlessly, pitch effectively, and analyze results faster and more efficiently. Founder-controlled, fully distributed, and growing sustainably, Muck Rack has received several awards for its unparalleled culture and product from organizations like Inc., Quartz, G2, and BuiltIn. We value resilience, transparency, ownership, and customer devotion, and infuse these values into everything we do.

We’re looking for a collaborative, self-motivated Senior Software Engineer, Search & AI to join our growing team. As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll help build and evolve the customer-facing search experiences that help users discover relevant, high-quality content, along with the backend systems that power them. You’ll work across the stack, with a slight emphasis on frontend development, and collaborate closely with engineers, Product, and Design to deliver intuitive search experiences backed by reliable, scalable search and data systems.

What You'll Do Own and deliver customer-facing search features and workflows across frontend and backend systems, from technical planning through production Build AI-powered product experiences end to end, from the services behind them to the interfaces that make their output useful and trustworthy Build intuitive, responsive user experiences using Vue while contributing to the Python and Django services that power them Design and improve search, indexing, and retrieval systems that support high-quality content discovery across large volumes of data Build and maintain features and data workflows that leverage technologies such as Elasticsearch, Kafka, Celery, and MySQL Make thoughtful technical decisions and trade-offs that balance customer experience, delivery speed, performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and engineering teammates to shape solutions, clarify requirements, and deliver high-quality customer experiences Troubleshoot complex production issues and drive improvements to the performance, reliability, observability, and maintainability of the systems you work on Participate in an on-call and incident response rotation, helping diagnose and resolve production issues and improve system reliability over time To Be Set Up for Success in This Role, You'll Need to Have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and maintaining production software Strong experience working across frontend and backend systems and independently delivering features throughout the application stack Proficiency with Python or a similar programming language and experience with Django or a comparable web framework Experience building polished, maintainable user-facing applications with Vue.js or another modern JavaScript framework Experience with Elasticsearch or a comparable search technology, or significant experience working with data-intensive systems Experience making technical trade-offs within complex production systems while balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term quality Experience diagnosing production issues and contributing to the reliability and operational health of the systems you build Experience with TypeScript in a large codebase Experience with design systems or shared component libraries Flexibility to adjust working hours for overlap with teammates in US time zones If Any of the Below Also Describe You, This Could Be an Exciting Opportunity Experience with Kafka or other streaming or event-driven technologies Experience with MySQL, Postgres, or other relational databases Experience with Celery or other asynchronous task-processing systems Experience building search, discovery, indexing, or information-retrieval features Experience improving frontend architecture, performance, or complex customer-facing workflows Experience working with high-traffic SaaS applications or systems that process large volumes of data Experience building customer-facing features backed by LLMs or other AI models Experience judging whether an AI-backed feature is actually working, through evaluation, testing, or user feedback Interest in journalism, news, media, or social media In Addition, We're Always Looking for Candidates Who Communicate complex technical ideas clearly and collaborate effectively with both technical and non-technical partners Take ownership of problems and drive work forward independently while knowing when to involve others Take pride in building readable, testable, maintainable software while making pragmatic technical trade-offs Approach ambiguous or complex problems thoughtfully and use sound judgment to identify effective solutions Contribute to a strong engineering culture through thoughtful code reviews, knowledge sharing, feedback, and continuous improvement Proactively incorporates AI tools into day-to-day work to improve productivity and accelerate delivery Interview Overview Below you'll find an outline of the interview plan for this role.