Principal Engineer- Search

About Snapmint

Founded by IIT Bombay alumni (Nalin Agrawal, Anil Gelra, Abhineet Sawa), Snapmint is building India's most loved payment brand. We pioneered Pay in 3 through UPI and are also home to India's leading 0% EMI ecommerce app — giving millions of Indians the freedom to shop now and pay in monthly instalments, with no extra cost and no credit card required.

Today, Snapmint has crossed 50M+ app downloads and is the preferred payment partner for 2,000+ leading consumer brands, including Zepto, ixigo, Adani, District Store, Titan and many more. We're on a mission to make fair, transparent credit accessible to Young India - and make payments simple, enjoyable and worry-free.

Headquartered in Mumbai, with offices across major metros including Bengaluru, Gurugram, Delhi and Jaipur, we're building at the intersection of commerce, credit, technology and culture. If you want to work on a product used by millions, build a brand people genuinely love, and help redefine how the next generation of India pays and spends you'll fit right in.

Come build Snapmint and help us change how India pays.

The Role

We are looking for a Principal Engineer - Search to lead the vision, architecture, and evolution of Snapmint's Search platform. This role is responsible for building industry-leading search experiences that help millions of users discover relevant products quickly and efficiently across Snapmint's ecommerce ecosystem.

As a Principal Engineer, you will drive technical strategy, mentor engineering teams, influence cross-functional product decisions, and architect highly scalable, low-latency search systems leveraging modern Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Generative AI technologies.

You will play a critical role in shaping the future of Search, Personalization, and Discovery at Snapmint.

• Role Title: Principal Engineer - Search

• Department: Technology

• Employment Type: Fulltime

• Experience: 10-13 Yrs.

• Location: Bengaluru

• Working Model: Work from Office – 5 Days per Week

What You Own

• Define and drive the vision, architecture, and roadmap for Snapmint's Search & Discovery platform.

• Architect scalable, low-latency, and highly available search systems serving millions of requests.

• Lead search relevance initiatives across query understanding, ranking, semantic retrieval, personalization,

and GenAI-powered search.

• Design and optimize indexing pipelines, search APIs, and core discovery capabilities including

autocomplete, recommendations, filters, and zero-result recovery.

• Establish best practices for scalability, performance, observability, and operational excellence.

• Define search quality metrics (CTR, Conversion, Recall, Precision, Latency) and drive continuous improvement through experimentation and A/B testing.

• Partner with Product, Data Science, Catalog, and Personalization teams to enhance product discoverability and customer experience.

• Mentor senior engineers and provide technical leadership across the organization.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building large-scale Search,

Discovery, Recommendation, or Information Retrieval systems.

• Strong expertise in Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Apache Solr, or similar search technologies.

• Deep understanding of Information Retrieval fundamentals including:

o Inverted indexes

o Tokenization

o Analyzers

o BM25

o Query parsing

o Faceting

o Relevance tuning

o Ranking models

• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale, distributed backend systems.

• Strong hands-on experience with query understanding systems such as spell correction, synonym

management, multilingual search, transliteration, and query expansion.

• Experience building scalable search APIs and search platforms serving high-volume traffic.

• Expertise in search performance optimization, capacity planning, caching strategies, and low-latency architecture.

• Strong knowledge of semantic search, embeddings, vector databases, and hybrid retrieval

architectures.

• Experience implementing Learning-to-Rank frameworks and ML-driven ranking systems in production environments.

• Demonstrated ability to lead large technical initiatives and influence cross-functional engineering

organizations.

Good to Have

• Experience building Search & Discovery platforms for ecommerce, fintech marketplaces, or large

consumer internet products.

• Experience with Generative AI and LLM-powered search, including:

o Conversational search

o Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

o Query rewriting

o Search assistants

o Search personalization

• Experience with vector databases and modern retrieval frameworks.

• Familiarity with recommendation systems and personalization engines.

• Experience leading organization-wide architecture reviews and technical strategy initiatives.

• Strong track record of mentoring senior engineers and growing technical leadership within teams.

• Experience driving experimentation frameworks and relevance optimization through A/B testing at scale.

Why Snapmint

• Be Part of a 10X–100X Journey - Help build and scale and be part of a high-growth story.

• Raise the Bar - Learn from people who raise the bar.

• Solve Hard Problems - Work on meaningful, high-impact challenges.

• Own the Outcome - Take ownership and make things happen.

• Move Fast, Build Fast - Turn ideas into action, not backlogs.

• Make Real Impact - See your work reach millions of customers.

• Grow with Snapmint - Take on bigger challenges as we scale.

Explore Snapmint

• Meet The Founders - Nalin Agrawal, Anil Gelra, Abhineet Sawa

• Life at Snapmint - https://www.linkedin.com/company/snapmintfinserv/life

• Behind the Build: The Snapmint Story - https://www.youtube.com/watchv=M3vRIxfa7tc

• Business Case Studies - https://www.snapmintbusiness.com/case-studies