Fixing search reliability for a feature used across the platform
Software Engineer · Bonterra · 2022 – Present
Diagnosed and fixed a cluster of reliability problems in a search feature used across the platform, from limitations in the underlying search technology to duplicate and inconsistent results.
Context
A shared search feature was used in several places across the platform, so problems there had a wide blast radius rather than staying contained to one team. Users kept running into inconsistent, sometimes duplicated results, and it wasn't clear from the outside whether the underlying search technology could even support the matching behavior people expected.
Approach
Ran a research spike into the underlying search technology's configuration to establish what better matching would actually require, then used those findings to track down and fix a handful of specific bugs causing duplicate and incorrect results.
Separately cleaned up a data-integrity issue tied to a records-management process that had left search results in an inconsistent state.
Outcome
Search returned consistent, accurate results across every surface that depended on it, not just the one team that first reported the problem.