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Career Path: How to Become a Search Engineer

You have made up your mind and are ready to become a Search Engineer. Companies across the world are looking for skilled individuals to help structure their data sets into useful information for growing their customer base. Because of that, this specialized field was created. With the constant changes made to algorithms in search engines due to the development of new technologies, you can assist businesses to elevate their status and reach their targeted customers.

Getting Through the Door

To land an entry-level job as a Search Engineer, you will need to have am...more

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Salary range for Search Engineers

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Opportunities for Search Engineers

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CAREER GUIDE

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HIRED BLOG

Career-building content for Search Engineers

We've collected tons of information on salaries, compensation, negotiation and more. See even more on our blog.

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Career Path: How to Become a Search Engineer

You have made up your mind and are ready to become a Search Engineer. Companies across the world are looking for skilled individuals to help structure their data sets into useful information for growing their customer base. Because of that, this specialized field was created. With the constant changes made to algorithms in search engines due to the development of new technologies, you can assist businesses to elevate their status and reach their targeted customers.

Getting Through the Door

To land an entry-level job as a Search Engineer, you will need to have amassed some key skills. Learning about software development and programming is a good place to start. Being familiar with how search engines work, as well as analytics, marketing and business models, are important. You also need to have basic coding skills, knowledge of algorithms, machine learning, AI learning and distributed computing.

Other technical skills that can give you an advantage include experience with HTTP, Lucene, Solr and Elasticsearch, as well as programming languages like R, Java, Scala and PHP. Familiarity with microservices architecture and big data processing will also help. Some minimum requirements that you will need to qualify as an entry- or junior-level search engineer include:

  • Ability to work with structured and unstructured data across large database tables
  • Development of technology tools to provide real-time analytical results for monitoring key business metrics
  • Understanding of distributed systems and core computer science fundamentals
  • Being detailed-oriented with good problem-solving, analytical and communication skills
  • Can work well independently and in a team environment

Degrees and Experience

To land that first job as a search engineer, employers look for you to have at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics or information technology. Companies may also seek a few years of experience with SQL and Linux-based systems. Having certifications will give you a plus on your résumé. You can also take online courses or boot camps on sites like Byte Academy, Udemy, DataCamp and Coursera.

Working as a Junior-Level Engineer

As a junior-level engineer, you are tasked with developing frameworks for peak performance, measurements and tuning. Designing and prototyping data visualization, analysis tools and algorithms, as well as documenting, summarizing and presenting your findings are part of the job. A junior-level engineer will assist other team members with daily tasks. You will also do data mining, predictive and statistical modeling along with troubleshooting technical issues that arise.

Moving Up the Ranks

You have now obtained the necessary experience as a search engineer to move up the ladder in your career. Being able to communicate and collaborate with others is very important when it comes to completing projects successfully. Gaining more experience with SQL queries and REST principles is a must. Familiarity with fault-tolerant architecture, deployment processes, JSON and AWS will help advance your career. You should also increase your scripting skills.

Advance Your Career: How to Become a Senior Search Engineer

Senior Search Engineers will support and lead analytics and automation teams in the use of data analysis, visualization and statistical modeling. They are responsible for researching, developing and improving algorithms. Senior-level engineers will perform deep learning and optimization techniques for recommendations and decisions. They will also use APIs to pull data and manage workflows.

Study the Core Fields

To be an expert search engineer, you have to be skilled in your field. This involves being aware of best practices based on emerging trends, as well as frontend and backend technologies. Gaining more experience with application development along with writing unit and integration tests is important. Senior search engineers have to be able to code and communicate well with analysts, other engineers and others to resolve open-ended problems. You can also boost your career by obtaining an advanced degree.

Invest in Yourself

You have proven your expertise in the field as a search engineer. You can perform detailed analysis along with troubleshooting problems and identify opportunities. You understand agile methodologies, relevance and ranking metrics, issue tracking and source repository technologies like Git. As a senior search engineer, you will take full ownership of the development lifecycle by building, designing and operating applications. Having excellent analytical, time management and communication skills is something you possess.

Don't Stop at Engineer

Expand your knowledge by taking advantage of training and other educational opportunities while on the job. There are associations where you can gain valuable insight like SIGKDD (Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining), SIP (Society of Internet Professionals) and IDEAS (International Data Engineering and Science Association). This can further accelerate your goals by helping you keep up with industry trends and building a stronger network of skilled individuals that may offer access to potential clients or employers.

Search Engineer Job Description

We’ve done the research for you. After evaluating numerous job descriptions, we’ve written our own representative job description for a mid-level engineer with between two and five years of relevant experience.

As a search engineer, you will develop, maintain, test and optimize the search engine for a company's platform. You are able to construct scalable and reliable workflows that efficiently process big datasets. You can also work independently, as well as efficiently in a team environment. Our search engineers are self-motivated and display leadership qualities. We welcome diversity and encourage healthy debate and discussion.

What We Need Your Help With

  • Developing and operating search software, including indexing, query parsing and algorithms
  • Designing and deploying high-performance RESTful web services
  • Scaling search server clusters to accommodate increasing traffic by performance tuning
  • Improving search relevance using text matching algorithms and NLP techniques
  • Implementing and deploying machine learning models to production systems
  • Find, import and make searchable public data that will be used to optimize the search process
  • Build and utilize metrics for analyzing relevance and ranking
  • Develop systems that integrate with real-time data services and sources
  • Design search engine monitoring tools, as well as scalable backend services and tools
  • Craft libraries, schedule data pipelines and manage access data assets
  • Write automated unit test cases for search engines and troubleshoot search relevance issues
  • Implement major components for data pipelines and analytics platforms
  • Improve the reliability, efficiency, scalability and latency of existing services and processes
  • Collaborate with data analysts, developers and others in a cross-functional team to resolve problems

What We Look For

  • 4+ years in software development and programming
  • 3+ years of working with ETL, big data, datasets and NoSQL
  • 3+ years of using search engine platforms such as ElasticSearch, Lucene, Solr or Endeca
  • Experience implementing search engine platforms, including shards, builds of indexes and refined searches across structured, unstructured and semi-structured datasets
  • Experience with resource planning and architectural design
  • Experience with automated processes and techniques for bulk indexing of large-scale datasets
  • Experience implementing microservices and Java applications
  • Experience doing distributed queuing with technologies like Kafka
  • Familiarity with version control like Git and AWS
  • Strong understanding of programming languages such as Java, SQL, C++, Python or Scala
  • Proficiency with data processing algorithms
  • Excellent project management, organizational, analytical, problem-solving and communication skills
  • B.S or M.S. degree in computer science, software or data engineering, information systems or other related fields

These Would Also Be Nice

  • Experience with Jenkins, Maven, MapReduce, Spark, Hadoop, Hive or TensorFlow
  • Experience with Python machine learning libraries and Linux environments
  • Experience with Java JVM tuning and debugging
  • Experience with Node.js, React.js and PHP frameworks
  • Familiarity with mobile technologies such as Android, iOS and React Native

Senior Search Engineer Career Paths: Where To Go From Here

You have obtained 10 years of experience and are ready for a new challenge. With companies around the world collecting massive amounts of data on their systems in order to gather more insight about their customers and compete with competitors, they are in desperate need of high-level data/search engineers. There is a shortage in this field, especially of those with advanced skills, making your expertise in great demand.

Senior Search Engineers can easily transition into the role of Senior Data Scientist who's responsible for developing, testing and improving algorithms to drive customer retention, as well as managing the activities and the work product of data analysts. There's also the position of Senior Manager of Business Analytics in which they will lead data-driven analysis, create analytic models and assist in developing business strategies. The Director of Analytics is next if you follow this path. It's a high-level position that involves managing the analyst team and assigning schedules, as well as projects. From this point, there's the role VP of Analytics who will analyze different market segments related to a client's industry, lead and supervise groups researching strategic business data, and define and meet annual budgetary goals.

The positions listed generally require a bachelor's degree with a master's being an employer's preferred choice, such as an MBA in some cases. Managerial and industry certifications along with expertise in business development or sales are a must-have on this journey. You will also need to possess not only superb communication skills but be able to work independently, lead effectively and make important decisions for the company as a whole.

Java is a statically-typed, cross-platform language. It is concurrent, class-based, and object-oriented. It has minimal implementation dependencies and compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilat...

C++

C++ is an object-oriented language derived from C, and invented by Bjarne Stroustrup, while working at AT&T's Bell Labs. It is widely used for systems-level programming, and building applications on Windows and various Unix operating systems (Lin...

C

C is a widely used low-level, static-typed, compiled computer language known for its efficiency. Developed in the late sixties, C has become one of the most widely used languages of all time. It provides direct access to memory and due to its de...

Python is an object-oriented programming language notable for its clarity, power and flexibility. Python is an interpreted language, meaning that an interpreter reads and runs the code directly, rather than compiling down into static lower level c...

PHP

PHP is a widely-used open-source scripting language that has seen wide use in web application development. PHP code must be processed by an interpreter like the Zend Engine. With a strong open-source community and large adoption world-wide, PHP ...

.NET is a framework created by Microsoft that consists of common language runtime and its own class library. Its key benefits are managing code at execution in the form of memory management, thread management and remoting. It also has added safet...

SQL

Structured Query Language (SQL) is a highly popular domain specific language (DSL) used to communicate with relational database management systems (RDBMS). SQL is a standard that is based on the "relational model", defined by professor E.F. Codd,...

Scala is a strongly, statically typed functional/object-oriented language primarily targeted to the JVM. It brings a lot of powerful programming language concepts out of academia, placing them into the hands of practitioners. A key design emphas...

R is a language designed for data manipulation and visualization. It is capable of doing various statistical computing and graphic generation (including linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classificat...

Top industries hiring Search Engineers

eCommerce

The retail landscape has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Retail was once a brick-and-mortar industry, comprised of small, independently owned-and-operated businesses and large chain stores with multiple outposts throughout the c...

Analytics

Analytics and Business Intelligence roles are often confused but are also directly linked. Data that is collected when a user interacts with a system is then cleaned and stored. That data is then accessed using reports and graphical dashboards. Th...

Education

The education industry involves working in an environment that implements and teaches various skills and applicable material. Formal education typically involves various levels of education, including preschool, primary, secondary, tertiary, vo...

Security

Security industry jobs tend to involve the patrolling and guarding of physical assets, buildings and compounds, people, or anything else of value that one cares to protect. Jobs in the industry range from the individuals that actually perform t...

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