> As somebody that has written a search engine, I would suggest you implement one and make it accessible to overcome the junior title
Their search infrastructure is built upon Elasticsearch, which I have direct experience scaling / putting out fires in my previous job.
So, I did have experience that was extremely relevant to their position (granted, not at the scale that they operate at, but that's always to be expected).
That being said, your point about "I've read they don't hire junior people" is precisely why I think I didn't make it past stage zero. So I totally agree with you there. I had a total of ~1.5 years of experience at my previous company, as an intern and then full-time, but since I was finishing up school during the tail end of my internship, I was only working full-time for ~7-8 months. So I'd bet it was certainly that.
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Back on your idea about writing a search engine, perhaps I could see if there's some contributions I could make to Apache Lucene, which is the "kernel" that powers Elasticsearch.
Honestly the post for https://grep.app that was posted a few days ago is a perfect example of demonstrating what you can do. He had the CTO of GitHub reach out to him publicly.
I'm pretty sure if you can demonstrate how you can orchestrate a cluster of Elasticsearch nodes, it will go a long way. And if you can contribute to the many discussions they have about Elasticsearch in their issues, it will go a long way to demonstrate your domain knowledge.
As for Lucene, I wouldn't invest any time in contributing to it, as it has been iterated on for over a decade by very smart people. Just build something with Lucene or build something like https://grep.app
Their search infrastructure is built upon Elasticsearch, which I have direct experience scaling / putting out fires in my previous job.
So, I did have experience that was extremely relevant to their position (granted, not at the scale that they operate at, but that's always to be expected).
That being said, your point about "I've read they don't hire junior people" is precisely why I think I didn't make it past stage zero. So I totally agree with you there. I had a total of ~1.5 years of experience at my previous company, as an intern and then full-time, but since I was finishing up school during the tail end of my internship, I was only working full-time for ~7-8 months. So I'd bet it was certainly that.
--
Back on your idea about writing a search engine, perhaps I could see if there's some contributions I could make to Apache Lucene, which is the "kernel" that powers Elasticsearch.