SDE 3 / Staff Engineer (Elasticsearch / OpenSearch / Solr)

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 e-commerce 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.

About the Role

We are looking for a SDE 3 / Staff Engineer to build and scale Snapmint's Search & Discovery platform across its e-commerce ecosystem. The role will own search relevance, query understanding, indexing, and ranking systems, enabling fast, personalized, and highly relevant product discovery at scale.

• Role Title: SDE 3 / Staff Engineer
• Department: Technology
• Employment Type: Fulltime
• Experience: 6-10 Years
• Location: Bangalore
• Working Model: Work from Office – 5 Days per Week

What You Own

• Own the architecture and evolution of high-scale, low-latency Search & Discovery services, serving millions of search requests with strong reliability and performance.
• Build query understanding systems covering spell correction, synonym expansion, transliteration, multilingual search, intent detection, query rewriting, and attribute extraction.
• Own near-real-time catalog indexing pipelines to keep search indexes synchronized with catalog, pricing, inventory, and merchant updates.
• Drive search relevance and ranking using BM25, semantic search, Learning-to-Rank, business signals, and personalization.
• Build and improve search experiences including autocomplete, query suggestions, facets, filters, zero-result recovery, and related searches.
• Partner with Catalog, Personalization, Data Science, and Product teams to improve product discoverability and search quality.
• Define and optimize search metrics such as CTR, conversion rate, zero-result rate, recall, and latency through experimentation and A/B testing.
• Drive architecture, scalability, observability, performance optimization, and production excellence for the Search platform.

What You Bring

• 5+ years of experience building scalable backend systems using modern programming languages.
• Strong hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Apache Solr.
• Deep understanding of Information Retrieval, including inverted indexes, analyzers, tokenization, BM25, faceting, query parsing, indexing, and relevance tuning.
• Experience building query understanding systems, including spell correction, synonym expansion, query normalization, transliteration, and attribute extraction.
• • Experience designing scalable search APIs and near-real-time indexing pipelines for large product catalogs.
• Understanding semantic search, embeddings, and hybrid lexical semantic retrieval.
• Experience with Learning-to-Rank or ML-based ranking models in production search systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, caching, search performance optimization, and low-latency system design

Good to Have

• Experience building e-commerce or marketplace search systems.
• Experience using LLMs for query understanding, query rewriting, or conversational search.
• Experience running online experiments and A/B testing to improve search relevance and business metrics.

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